


Flicker Out

by BonelessGoo



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-02-18 09:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13097433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BonelessGoo/pseuds/BonelessGoo
Summary: Evan is just a little more persistent about getting that letter back on the first day of school, one or two things go right when it really matters, and Connor and Evan become unlikely friends. But letting someone in isn't so easy when you've spent your teen years building walls around yourself. Doing the right thing is an uphill climb. Is it one they're both willing to make?(also ten metric tons of angst.)





	1. Hurt People Hurt People

**Author's Note:**

> Slow SLOOW burn, my man. I am such a tediously long writer so buckle in and get yourself a snack or smth bc it might be a while before these boys get together.  
> Thanks + leave me a comment yall~

  
  


Connor moves the paper away before Evan can get to it. Evan’s heart lurches in his chest as Connor’s eyes scan down the page.  
  
“Because there’s Zoe…?” Connor reads. “Uh… is this about my sister?”  
  
“N-No, no, no, no-” Evan starts to panic.  
  
“You wrote this because you knew that I would find it.” Connor raises the paper further up out of Evan’s reach.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Yeah. you, uh- you saw that I was the only other person in the computer lab so you wrote this and you printed this out so that I would find it.” A sour smile crosses Connor’s face as he looks at Evan’s letter.  
  
“Why- um- why would I-”  
  
“So I would read some creepy shit you wrote about my sister and freak out!” Connor begins to shout. “And then you can tell everybody that I’m crazy, right?!”  
  
“What? N-No-!” Evan stutters.  
  
“Fuck you!” Connor slams out of the computer lab, letter in hand.  
  
“No, I didn’t, I- Just please give it back I need it-”  
  
Evan stumbles out and follows down the hall as fast as he can manage on shaky legs. He sprints to catch up and catches Connor by the sleeve when he tries to round a corner. Connor whirls on Evan and snaps at him, pushing him straight into the wall. Evan chokes back a yelp as his back bounces off the smooth brick.  
  
“P-Please, can you just- can you give it back?”  
  
“Jesus, leave me alone!” Connor yells.  
  
Evan looks around the hallway nervously in the wake of the sound. Connor is going to attract someone else's attention and then he’ll have an even worse reason to skip therapy.  
  
“I-I-I will, I swear. Just please give it back.”  
  
“You knew I was there. You _wanted_ this to happen. _You wanted this!_ So if I hurt you it'll be _your_ fault!” Connor advances on Evan, still yelling at full volume. “ _Connor Murphy’s a fucking psychopath! He's a danger to the whole school!_ Is that it?!”  
  
Evan tries to sidle his way out of Connor's reach against the wall and almost falls over his own feet instead.  
  
“I-I-I-I” Evan sticks on the first syllable of a sentence he hasn't even thought through.  
  
“Speak up, asshole!” Connor slams his hand on the wall just a few feet from Evan’s head.  
  
“I-It was- it was- for therapy, I-” Evan hiccups in between breaths. “I-I was printing it for later. I wrote it to myself.”  
  
Connor’s jaw muscle twitches as he clenches it shut. He glances down at his name scrawled across the plaster on Evan's arm from just a minute earlier and takes a breath that moves his entire frame. There's a split second of hesitation in which Connor's mouth opens but nothing comes out, but then his lip curls and he lets the paper float to the ground. He makes a show of throwing his hands up as he walks away.  
  
"Fucking freak," Connor mutters from over his shoulder.  
  
Evan’s too disoriented to react. He stares blankly at the floor where the paper has slid. The insult is nothing new, however he feels like he's got whiplash.  
  
Connor storms off and marches up the stairwell a few feet away. Evan waits until he can't hear Connor's steps anymore before retrieving the letter from the floor.  
  
_Talk about two-faced…_  
  
Evan stares up the stairwell after Connor even though he’s already long gone, then takes a look at his cast, inspecting Connor’s name again. For a second it had almost seemed like Connor was being kind, but then he turned around and snapped.  
  
_Maybe he really is bipolar or something._  
  
Evan gives a hangdog smile as he stares at the capital letters all the way across his arm, realizing he’s got to live with this for the next three weeks. As if the cast itself weren’t enough of a burden to begin with.

  


• • •

  


That afternoon, Evan’s therapist asks about the name on his cast. He stutters and tells her it was just a classmate who was being nice to him, not someone he knew. Dr. Sherman asks him if he and Connor have ever spoken before, what Connor is like, and Evan draws a blank.  
  
“I don’t really know him. I-I mean, I’ve heard of him but we’ve never spoken before today-- or, uh- not really, I guess,” Evan mutters, “That doesn’t really count.”  
  
“What doesn’t count?”  
  
“I-It was nothing. He’s talked to me a couple times actually b-but not really.” Evan frowns.  
  
“Oh? Were you two in the same class?”  
  
“Uh… He, uh- he pushed me down in the hall today.”  
  
Dr. Sherman raises her eyebrows and crosses her ankles. “Before or after he signed your cast?”  
  
“Before.”  
  
“That’s... odd. Do you want to talk about what happened this morning?”  
  
Evan tugs on the bottom of his shirt and hesitates. He thinks of how connor had stopped for a second when Evan explained what the letter was-- when he’d mentioned _therapy_ , and then Connor had quieted and walked off without addressing it. There’s no denying something is off about the whole situation, but does Evan really want to talk about it? He’d rather not get wrapped up in Connor Murphy’s reputation any more than he already has.  
  
“We don’t have to,” Dr. Sherman says, “You seem troubled by it, but it can wait.”  
  
Evan ends up telling her the whole story, from when Connor pushed him that morning to when he stormed off insisting that Evan had written the letter just to hurt him. Dr. Sherman hums thoughtfully and takes a few notes as he speaks, asks _what did you think about when that happened?_ a couple of times. By the time Evan gets to the end of his day, Dr. Sherman is leaning forward with a thoughtful expression.  
  
“So… he’s kind of scary. I didn’t know what to think,” Evan finishes.  
  
Dr. Sherman sits up and taps her pen on the armrest. “Let me tell you something that I believe is true,” she begins, speaking slowly. ” _Hurt people_ hurt people. Do you see what I'm trying to say?”  
  
Evan knits his brows together. “Not really.”  
  
“Some people are malicious because it makes them feel better. Because they already feel hopeless themselves, it makes them feel bigger even if just for a little bit.”  
  
Evan frowns bitterly. He's heard this one before. _Yeah, the bullies feel just like you do. Sure._  
  
Dr. Sherman continues regardless. “It's a defense mechanism. Some people think that if they can make it seem like they’re mean and terrible for no reason, like they’re not really a person, then maybe people will leave them alone. It’s a way of detaching themselves from others in response to rejection.”  
  
Evan flattens his lips together, trying to make sense of the idea. It feels contradictory to think of Connor as a victim, of all things. He’s the instigator. He always throws the first punch.  
  
Evan shakes his head. “Why did he sign my cast then?”  
  
“Why do _you_ think he signed your cast?” Dr. Sherman fires back.  
  
Evan rolls his eyes. Dr. Sherman smiles.  
  
“I don’t know. It seemed like he was actually being friendly at first.”  
  
Evan thinks back to watching Connor grab his injured arm and sharpie his name on in huge capital letters. _Yeah, well now we can both pretend that we have friends_. Is that the part he should believe? It just seems so backwards.  
  
“Is it possible he was just being nice?” Dr. Sherman asks.  
  
“I guess.” Evan scratches the edge of his cast. “He has a funny way of being nice though.”  
  
“Sounds like he has some trouble with self-expression, huh?” Dr. Sherman says lightly. “Now, about that letter…”

  


• • •

  


"Connor Murphy is batshit out of his mind. Remember when he threw a printer at Mrs. G. in second grade because he didn't get to be the line leader that day?"  
  
“Yeah, no, but-”  
  
“Trust me, you do _not_ want to get involved with that. And you let him sign your cast?” Jared gestures at Evan’s arm and raises an eyebrow. “-- _all_ of your cast? You’re fucking asking for trouble.”  
  
“What was I supposed to do, say no? He was being nice.”  
  
“He was being _nice_?” Jared mocks.  
  
Evan doesn’t say anything. He looks down at the cast again and grimaces, trying to remember why he explained this to Jared in the first place. The bell rings for next period and classroom doors start opening down the hall.  
  
“You just had to print your sex letter in the computer lab, huh? Bet you’ll never make that mistake again.” Jared claps Evan on the shoulder and laughs as he goes to walk past.  
  
Evan mutters, mostly to himself, “But I feel like he...”  
  
Jared turns back on Evan. “You don’t actually think you’re friends now, do you?”  
  
Evan winces and picks at his clothes guiltily.  
  
“That’s adorable,” Jared snickers. He continues walking away, talking with apparently no regard for the eavesdropping of other students as he goes. ”You try to make friends with Connor Murphy, he’ll probably break your other arm.” Jared laughs at his own joke, disappearing into the forming crowd.  
  
Evan makes his way downstairs to the library for study hall. He takes his time, waiting behind the slow stream of traffic instead of weaving his way around the loiterers like usual. Someone bumps into Evan’s left shoulder, jostling the cast rather painfully. They clamber off down the hall in a mob, roughhousing as they go. He cradles his arm and pushes his way towards the doors, deciding he’ll take a spot in the corner and see if he can make himself invisible enough to fall asleep. He drops his backpack on the table and plops down into a seat, taking out a notebook so that it at least looks like he’s studying if anyone walks by. He stares blankly into his chemistry notes and lets his mind wander.  
  
Jared is certainly obnoxious but he’s not completely wrong either. Befriending Connor Murphy doesn’t seem like an easy, nor advisable venture, no matter how desperate he is. Maybe it’s pathetic that he’s even considering it. After all, if people think he’s friends with Connor, won’t that make them even less likely to talk to him? Isn’t that the goal?  
  
And besides all that, how would he even have begun? It’s never that easy. Evan’s just as terrible at talking to Connor as he is everybody else. Connor wouldn’t want to talk to him in the first place. What a stupid idea. _What did I think I was going to do, just show up and say hi? What would I have even said? “Hey, thanks for shoving me twice in one day?” There's no reason_ -  
  
“So you've got a crush on my sister, huh?”  
  
Evan practically rockets right out of his seat. And there’s Connor Murphy-- sliding into the seat across from Evan like it’s just a normal thing to do.  
  
Evan blinks stupidly at Connor before he registers what was said. “Oh, what? No, I-I- why-”  
  
“All my hope is pinned on Zoe who I don’t even know,“ Connor recites. “A little stalkerish, but still kind of poetic.”  
  
“That was...” Evan looks down at his notebook, face reddening at the memory.  
  
“Gotta warn ya, she’s got pretty high standards. You’ve gotta walk on water and blow sunshine out your ass to please her.” Connor leans back in his seat.  
  
Evan laughs quietly, still unwilling to look up. He can tell his face is red, and it’s not getting any better at this rate. He opens his mouth, looking for something to say, but draws a blank. The conversation is off to a bad start. Evan is still off balance and his heart is racing.  
  
_He’s not trying to harass you. He’s being nice...I think. Stop being such a freak_ , Evan tells himself, but it only makes him tense up even worse.  
  
Out of his peripheral vision, he sees Connor go to scratch his neck, but he aborts the motion halfway through and leans his elbow on the table instead. Evan glances up just briefly, enough to see Connor shift awkwardly and reposition himself in his seat. Connor… being awkward? The image is so bizarre that Evan almost stares. Why does Connor seem so uncomfortable? If this is his way of apologizing then it’s pretty cryptic.  
  
“So how did you fall out of a tree?” Connor gestures at Evan’s cast on the table.  
  
“Oh, um…” Evan looks up. At least this is something he knows how to get through. “I was climbing a tree at the park-- I worked there over the summer-- a-apprentice-” Evan waves his hand dismissively. “But I was climbing this big tree and I got too high so one of the branches just- I-It gave way and so I fell. Had to be thirty feet in the air.” Evan smiles nervously.  
  
Connor raises his eyebrows and takes a glance at Evan’s cast. He hums in acknowledgement.  
  
Connor doesn’t say anything more, and Evan returns to looking at the random page of notes he was open to. He can’t really pretend he’s doing anything and he can’t tell if Connor is looking at him.  
  
“I-I hit a branch on the way down, so-” Evan raises his cast in a small gesture and shrugs, trying to fill the silence.  
  
Connor shrugs in response. It seems like the conversation is over. Evan panics.  
  
“How did you, uh-” Evan starts. Connor looks back at him expectantly and Evan shrinks. Connor raises an eyebrow. “Your hair, uh, how did you… grow it out?”  
  
Evan tries not to roll his eyes at his own statement. He fists the edge of his shirt and grimaces.  
  
Connor smiles wryly. “That’s kind of what happens when you never cut it.” He runs his hand through the front of his hair, making it stick up and fall slowly back into place.  
  
“Right...” Evan mutters.  
  
Connor looks down at evan’s cast on the table to the side of his notebook.  
  
“No one else signed your cast, huh?”  
  
“Oh. uh, n-no. No one really wanted to.”  
  
_You kind of didn’t give them any room-- not that it matters_ , Evan muses.  
  
“Zoe would sign it if you asked. She’s a nice person.”  
  
“Oh no, I couldn’t. She wouldn’t want to. I-I’d just look stupid.” Evan stops himself there, before he can recall the way that interaction had actually gone. He can already feel his stomach start to turn at just the thought.  
  
“Who’s gonna say no if you ask them to sign your cast? Jerks?” Connor says.  
  
Evan casts his eyes to the side-- _Jared, Alana_...  
  
“Did somebody actually do that?” Connor scoffs. “What a douche.”  
  
“Ha, he’s not so bad. He’s just not a real friend.”  
  
Evan looks down and freezes for a second, remembering Connor’s name is on his arm. _You don’t actually think you’re friends now, do you?_ Evan cringes.  
  
“Yeah, some friend,” Connor says.  
  
Evan stares as Connor scrapes his chair backwards and stands, stretching casually. “Well…,” he grunts. “About enough time for a smoke left. I guess I’ll see you.”  
  
“Yeah.” Evan gives a weak wave and then Connor is walking off into the aisle next to him.  
  
Evan returns his eyes to the chem notes to avoid staring. He takes a few slow breaths, feeling the residual anxiety start to leave him. It’s a few minutes later that he realizes the period’s not even halfway over. Unless Connor was planning on sneaking out and smoking for a half hour, he’d just decided to skip out. Evan wonders briefly if he’d said something to make Connor leave, but then shakes his head-- he doesn’t want to think about it too hard.

  


• • •

  



	2. Wild-Eyed and Weary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> minor warning for use of the word "retarded" this chap

  


Evan elects not to tell Jared about talking to Connor again. After the first time, he doesn’t need to hear Jared badmouth Connor any more than he already has. He feels uncertain enough as it is. It’s not like it’s a big deal anyway. It’s just someone new who had a conversation with him that didn’t necessarily revolve around Evan being the butt end of a joke. Connor apologized, sort of. That was enough. His reputation shouldn’t have anything to do with it.  
  
Evan doesn’t mention it to his therapist either, because she doesn’t ask. He lies when his mother finally notices the giant name on his cast and asks who Connor is, saying it was just somebody in his class who took pity on him. It isn’t a complete lie after all. She doesn’t push it any further.  
  
After that day in study hall, Evan notices Connor in the halls and at lunch. It turns out he shares more than one class period with Connor. By the middle of next week, Evan realizes he’s still staring every time he passes. It takes him a while longer to figure out that there’s something bugging him, something he can’t quite pinpoint. Sure, the guy is sort of mysterious and brooding, but the _nice_ side of Connor that Evan got to see just briefly has him preoccupied.  
  
The next time Evan sees Dr. Sherman, he registers that it’s been an uncomfortably long time since he’s had a pleasant interaction with someone that’s not his mother or his therapist. Jared really doesn’t count. He always finds a way to put Evan down-- calling attention to the fact that they’re apparently not actually friends or making fun of his stutter whenever they talk. And Alana? He’s pretty sure she hardly knows his name.  
  
Connor didn’t condescend to him. There wasn’t malice behind anything he said-- well, at least when he was being _nice_. And when Evan thought he’d done something to ruin the conversation, Connor just took it in stride. He didn’t call attention to the way Evan fidgeted and stared, even though it was clear he noticed.  
  
The fact that such a small thing means so much to Evan is perhaps a sign that he’s even more desperate than he thought, but he’s trying not to dwell on that. That’s not what’s bothering him. He just doesn’t understand-- he’s always thought of Connor as a borderline bully, but after getting to see his actual personality, he’s... _funny? Interesting?_ It doesn’t make sense.  
  
Still, Evan doesn’t have the guts to talk to him. So he sees him in the halls, notices him slip out before study hall every day, but they don’t talk. It isn’t until almost two weeks later that he speaks to Connor again.  
  
Evan is making his way up to the computer lab for lunch-- he’s taken to procrastinating on these stupid letters and writing them at school the day they’re due. He’s about to push into the lab when he hears a slam from a room a few yards down the hall followed by a muffled string of curses.  
  
“Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”  
  
_Crash_.  
  
Evan falters for a full second, staring in the direction of the sound. It’s quiet for another few moments, but then he can make out a set of quick footsteps and a familiar voice spitting all sorts of expletives.  
  
Evan backs away from the lab and slinks towards the sound of someone muttering and pacing in one of the classrooms nearby. He sidles up to the back door of the room that’s hanging halfway open and peeks cautiously around the corner. The lights are out so it’s a bit murky inside, but he freezes in the doorway when Connor stomps into view in the front of the room, hands balled into fists at his sides. One of the metal chairs in the front row is upturned, the corresponding desk shoved into its neighbors.  
  
All of a sudden, Connor snarls and rams his fist into the blackboard.  
  
Evan lets out a gasp and Connor’s head snaps towards where Evan is standing, the look on his face pure disgust.  
  
“Oh, fucking great. What do _you_ want?” Connor shouts at him.  
  
Evan puts his hands up and backs up a step. “N-Nothing-”  
  
“Just figured you’d show up and watch?”  
  
“N-No, I...”  
  
Connor turns and faces the blackboard. He grabs the side of his head and twists his fingers in his hair, pulling hard enough that it has to be painful.  
  
Evan edges his way into the room and watches Connor continue to pace in and out of the blocks of shadow cast by the blinds. He’s hyperventilating in a way that makes his whole chest heave as he walks, a borderline snarl twitching at his lips. Evan stares, his mouth hanging open with nothing to say. There it is again, that dissonance between this Connor and the one who signed his cast. This is what’s been keeping Evan from leaving him alone. As Evan looks closer, he sees the way Connor’s lips tremble over his breath, the way he keeps throwing his hands around because they’re shaking, and something clicks into place. He’s about to take a step forward when Connor marches across the front and starts beating his hand against the teacher’s desk--  
  
“Stop looking at me like that!”  
  
Evan averts his eyes compulsively, but looks back a second later.  
  
Connor throws his hands out and speaks with a frenzied lilt. “Oh, I bet you love this. You’ve got front row seats, baby! Tell all your friends you watched me get fucking expelled!” He spins around and points towards the ceiling before looking back at Evan. “Oh wait-- you don’t have any!”  
  
The insult nearly falls flat, Connor’s voice devolving into something that’s a bit less than angered.  
  
“Connor,” Evan starts.  
  
A low murmuring bubbles up from next door, a class listening in on the commotion. The teacher’s voice warbles behind it, a choppy stream of nervous words that sounds like one half of a phone conversation. Somewhere at the far end of the hall outside, there’s the sound of two brisk sets of footsteps tapping towards the room.  
  
“Show’s over. Get out,” Connor rumbles, and Evan shakes his head. This is the Connor he wants to recognize, and he sounds… _awful_.  
  
The footsteps are closing in. Evan looks around nervously. If he could hold them off for just a second, he might be able to-  
  
Connor lets out a sudden growl. He grabs a textbook off the teacher’s desk and launches it right into the front door with a loud boom.  
  
“GET OUT!” he roars.  
  
Evan recoils and immediately slips out the back, escaping down the stairs. In the echo of the stairwell, he hears Connor screaming at the top of his lungs as a teacher steps into the room and his heart sinks. There’s another heavy slam as Evan gets to the bottom. He tries not to think about what must be happening. A floor below, he stumbles out into the hallway and makes himself slow to a normal speed now that he's out of earshot.  
  
Evan walks a very scenic route to the cafeteria on autopilot, through empty halls that feel downright desolate in the aftermath of what he’s just seen. The image sticks in Evan’s mind like a bruise-- Connor marching back and forth, fists flying out to make contact with whatever he got close enough to. There was that high break in his voice as he yelled, and then when he’d quieted like before, the gravel that took its place. The idea that something like that was just under the surface, and how transparent it became when Evan pushed just a little… it makes him feel sick for reasons he can’t really explain. At least he’ll have something to tell his therapist tonight.  
  
Evan sneaks in to lunch, successfully bypassing the lunch monitors by virtue of being generally invisible. He sits down by himself at an empty side of the cafeteria and doesn't bother pulling out the lunch he packed. The period is almost over when a hand whaps him on the shoulder twice.  
  
“Thought you decided to skip. Where’d you go?” Jared says.  
  
Evan jumps. “Noth- uh, nowhere.”  
  
Jared dumps the last of his lunch tray into the trash and takes a seat across from Evan. He takes one look at Evan and scoffs. “Who pissed in your cornflakes?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“What’s with the face, man? You look like shit.” Jared puts his feet up on the empty seat across from him.  
  
“I’m making a face?” Evan blinks up at Jared from where he sits, unwilling to pick his head up from his hand.  
  
“Uh, yeah. It’s your _kicked puppy number two_ face,” Jared teases.  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
Jared raises his eyebrows and links his hands behind his head. “Alright, what happened?”  
  
Evan sinks his head heavier against his hand. There’s no way he’s going to explain this to Jared.  
  
“Nothing, I just went to the computer lab.”  
  
“Ah, okay.” Jared smiles knowingly. “Somebody catch you writing another one of your sex letters?”  
  
Evan narrows his eyes in exasperation. “...Yeah,” he lies.  
  
Jared laughs once, already cheering up. “Dude, quit doing ‘em at school, you're just asking for someone to out you.”  
  
“You're probably right,” Evan deadpans.  
  
“You got lucky enough getting that one back from Connor. He could have ruined your life.” Jared shrugs. ”I know I would've.”  
  
Evan rolls his eyes. “Gee, thanks.”  
  
Jared sits back up as the other students around them start to pack up for the end of lunch.  
  
“Jeez, you're a mess. who was it this time?”  
  
Evan sighs quietly and doesn’t answer. He picks his backpack up from the floor.  
  
”Oh my god, it wasn’t Zoe, was it?” Jared asks.  
  
“No, it was s-somebody else.”  
  
Jared shakes his head. “Then why do you look like you just got rejected _hard_?” He slings his backpack onto his shoulders and stands. ”Guess it could have been worse.”  
  
Evan laughs mirthlessly and stands too. The bell buzzes for next period and everyone around them starts to shuffle.  
  
“Whoever it was, good fucking luck,” Jared calls over the sound, and with that he leaves Evan on his own. 

  


• • •

  


Evan sits through his last two classes, letting the worry fade as he focuses on the busy work his math teacher gives. At the end of the day, he realizes he still hasn’t written his letter for therapy tonight. He might have enough time if he rushes, so he hurries up to the computer lab and prints out something short and completely misleading.  
  
By the time he gets back to the main hallway, the crowd has thinned and slowed. He checks the time on his phone and decides to go out the side door to save time on the stairs. It's just outside the side entrance where he spots Connor walking out to the senior parking lot.  
  
Even from that distance away, it’s obvious Connor really doesn’t look good. He lags behind the rest of the people walking out to the lot, his shoulders dragged down by the bag slung across him. The students all seem to be giving him a wide berth. Some whisper to each other as they pass. When he passes close enough, Evan sees that there are dark hollows around his eyes now that hadn’t been there earlier. _Did he spend the rest of the day in the office?_ He looks like he hasn’t slept in a month, his glare at the asphalt ahead of him unfocused and flat. He doesn’t even notice Evan, despite passing within just a few feet of him.  
  
Something inside Evan twists and breaks.  
  
“Connor?”  
  
Connor looks up at hearing his name, but speeds up walking when he catches sight of Evan standing there. Evan falls into step behind him.  
  
“What do you want?” Connor mutters, still staring ahead.  
  
Evan has to jog a little to keep up with him and his longer legs. “I, um-” Evan starts, but can't complete the thought.  
  
“I don't have time for this.” Connor shoves his hands into his coat pockets and walks stiffly.  
  
“Wait-” Evan tries, stumbling in his effort to walk faster.  
  
Connor ignores him, trying to shrug his way away from Evan as he goes. Evan finally gets close enough to Connor’s speed that he can get a good look at him. Up close, the stress is even more apparent. It’s the same thing Evan saw in that darkened classroom, except it's worse-- like it’s taking everything Connor has just to contain it.  
  
Evan panics as they near the far edge of the lot. Before he can think about what he's doing, he grabs Connor by the arm.  
  
“Wait, please. Con-”  
  
Connor yanks himself out of Evan’s grip and spins to advance suddenly on him. Evan cringes, bracing for an impact, but nothing comes.  
  
“What the fuck?” Connor seethes, looking around at the other students filtering through the lot. He clenches his jaw and crushes his fingers into fists.  
  
Evan shrinks back a step, unable to speak.  
  
“ _Well_?” Connor responds by taking a menacing step forward.  
  
Evan’s mouth opens on the first syllable of a word but he can’t manage to voice it.  
  
“Fucking spit it out already, freak.” Connor growls, stepping further into Evan’s space in an effort to keep his volume low. He looms over Evan, backing him away from the car. ”Are you retarded? I-I-I-I-” Connor mocks. “Use your words.”  
  
Evan backs all the way up to the curb and stumbles over his feet, almost falling into the grass. Connor has stopped advancing and is looking down at him expectantly. It takes some effort, but Evan gathers up his courage to meet Connor’s glare. He thinks about what Dr. Sherman told him. _Hurt people hurt people. It’s a defense mechanism_.  
  
Connor is furious, even worse than he was earlier that day. He stands over Evan in a clear threat, but as Evan looks a little harder, the rest of his posture tells a different story. In addition to the aggressive stance, Connor is gripping onto the strap of his bag across his chest, his body turned so that he’s not quite facing Evan head on. His shoulders are stiff and they move to his quick, agitated breaths. It’s shockingly defensive to look at. Connor is the first to look away and Evan realizes that Connor is somehow expecting him to say something upsetting.  
  
Evan straightens up and squares with Connor, stepping around to the side. He glances between Connor, the ground, and the back of the school.  
  
“S-Sorry,” Evan begins.  
  
Connor turns towards his car, scowling.  
  
“Are you okay?” Evan pushes on, then immediately cringes at how lame it sounds.  
  
Connor blinks in utter confusion ” _That's it_?” he scoffs. “Fucking seriously?”  
  
Evan’s cheeks heat up under Connor’s glare. He thinks about bolting for the back of the school, but Connor just rolls his eyes, paces a couple of steps away, and runs a hand through the front of his hair. He turns back towards the car and heaves a big sigh, looking skyward.  
  
“You’re a great person. Congratulations,” Connor sneers. “But I don’t think you get good karma for pitying me.”  
  
“I-I wasn’t trying to-”  
  
“Look, it doesn’t matter if I have a bad day. I don’t need your fucking sympathy.” Connor rips the door open and drops into the seat. He slams it with one last insult. “Jackass.”  
  
The busses start up down the street and Evan jumps out of the way as Connor reverses out of the parking lot without even waiting for him to move. He turns out onto the main road and speeds away.

  


• • •

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I love italics okay italics belongs everywhere don't you judge me_  
>  next update after christmas if I can manage to pull myself out of the garbage. thanks for the kudos <3
> 
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


	3. Crash

It’s August 12th, and Evan is wondering what it must be like to be dead. The house is empty. _He’s_ empty. It feels like the silence has brought everything to a heavy stop, like the only thing that’s pushing time forward is the slow draw of his breath. If he concentrates hard enough, he can pretend it’s all not real. Everything would be the same, just as quiet and empty and motionless if he wasn’t here.  
  
There’s only two weeks left of vacation and Evan feels like the entire thing has passed him by. Your last summer of high school is meant to be exciting, a time to cross things off your high school bucket list or go out with friends, and Evan has spent most of it where he is right now-- lying around in his room on a perfectly sunny Saturday, mind blank as the wall he’s been staring at for the past hour. If anyone knew he’d spent the day quite literally staring at a wall they’d think he’d lost his mind. Ostensibly, there might be something more interesting in store if he were to get up and out of his room, but he doesn’t really want to do that. He doesn’t really want to do anything. Evan's days start out this way more often than not lately.  
  
Up until recently, he’s been good about taking Dr. Sherman’s advice, but he finds himself stretching the truth a little further every week. He knows his mom worries about him, so he doesn't slip up. He’ll lie to her about today when she gets home in four hours and she won’t bat an eyelash. _It's not a total lie_ , he'll tell himself, he really is trying. He does his best to find something to do every day-- something other than lying here staring at the ceiling and wondering why nothing feels good anymore. He doesn’t let himself stay up on his laptop all night. He gets up before noon every day, brushes his teeth, gets dressed, and remembers to eat at the right times. When he can’t think of anything else to do, he walks aimlessly around the park and takes pictures. It doesn’t seem to help. Nothing does.  
  
It’s hard wanting to go out when every time he does, there’s something waiting out there to ruin the experience. He’s been by himself so much lately that it’s like his social skills have taken the opportunity to deteriorate as far as possible. When he goes to work, he always finds a way to do something stupid-- he stutters, stumbles over his own feet, sweats, and in general makes everybody around him uncomfortable. Every day that he does go out seems like a colossal effort that he’s not sure he can handle.  
  
The only thing that gets him out of the house these days is working at the park. He still makes it in for his shifts three times a week, but only because he absolutely makes himself. It's kind of a shame, because he does like work well enough. He feels pretty lucky to be able to work someplace that he really likes to be. Most of his coworkers aren't like him, though. They don’t want to hear Evan talk about all the trees and the furry critters that live in them. They'd rather… sit around on their phones or whatever, as if they couldn’t do that at home. Evan’s mom was excited that he might be able to find some people like him to talk to, but that hasn’t been the case.  
  
His co-workers must hate working with him, Evan thinks, since they have to pick up the slack from his mistakes so often. He's just a liability to them when it comes to dealing with patrons. Hardly anybody that he works with knows his name. Nobody cares. If he didn't show up, they'd probably be relieved.  
  
Evan rolls to his other side and his foot bumps into his laptop, which he’d abandoned somewhere at the edge the bed. The only thing he’s done today is roll over and open up his computer to spend a good hour exhausting all the content on his social media feeds. Facebook is downright depressing to look at, just a list of people who he barely knows doing things he's jealous of. Instagram is mostly just Alana posting pictures of her various volunteer activities because she’s the only one who would add him, so it’s the same story there. And of course Jared’s busy with his other friends and his job at some department store. He wouldn’t say much to Evan anyway, even if he did have the time. It's a Facebook message every couple of weeks or so, if that. If Evan dropped off the face of the earth, how long would it take someone to even notice?  
  
Before he knows it, his alarm is waking him up for an afternoon shift. He feels a little sick to his stomach, like his body is twice as heavy as it should be, but he pries himself up anyway. There’s an event happening at the park today, some kind of festival that’s bringing in a lot of parents and kids. Evan has to help set up and operate some tables for the day. It’s nothing too spectacular, but Evan’s been looking forward to it all month, just because it’s the only thing that's different.  
  
When he gets there for the day, people are already setting the place up for a crowd. A stage is going up in the center, the aisle lined by long tables. He falls into step with his co-workers, carrying things across the park and setting up tables and chairs. It isn’t until the people really start arriving that Evan realizes what the slight nausea he’s been feeling since this morning is about. The number of patrons they’d been expecting for this event has already been surpassed by mid-afternoon, and there are still hours of daylight left. They have to weave their way through the crowd to get to their jobs, and it seems like someone stops Evan to ask a question every few steps. It takes him a good thirty seconds of stuttering to tell someone that there’s a portable restroom by the parking lot, and another unnecessarily long time to explain that there is in fact a camping ground down the hill, and no, there’s not a family restroom, but there’s a visitor’s station down the road-- by which point a co-worker shows up and snatches the cargo he was carrying from him. He’s left to walk back and find something else to do, trying to shake it off. Someone asks him if he’s doing alright. He startles and rushes into some other activity without being able to answer.  
  
Another twenty minutes of this, and the event is in full swing. Evan is overheating from being in constant motion. The entire time, he’s had to stumble his way through strings of interactions one after another. It's turning out to be quite a bit more than he bargained for today. He starts to forget what he was doing when something forces him to multitask, and that same co-worker always pops in to push him back on track and fix his mistakes. Eventually, he feels like he’s making stupid mistake after stupid mistake, and when he has to cross the throng of people in the main aisle of the event once more, it’s the last straw.  
  
Evan looks through the crowd of people milling back and forth, unable to see his destination on the other side, and he forgets where he was going with the package in his hands. When he looks down, he realizes with a bolt of dread that his hands are shaking. He’s breathing like he’s been running around, but this time he’s been standing there in one spot for the past minute and _no, no, not now, not here._  
  
Regrets pop into Evan’s head one after the other. He should have planned far enough ahead to take one of his pills before coming here. He didn’t think to keep one in his pockets. They’re in his backpack and he can’t think straight enough to remember where that is, nor whether he even brought it with him. He should have let someone else carry this. He should have asked to sit at a station instead of working the floor. He should have just stayed in bed.  
  
Unsurprisingly, that same co-worker shows up and stands right in front of him. The name tag on her shirt says Chelsea, now that Evan notices. He stares straight ahead into her shoulder as she tries to get his attention, waving at him in at least three different ways, none of which register. She heaves a big sigh and gives up, taking the box right out of his hands and nudging him back from where he came. His legs won't move. He's pretty sure they're numb and if he tries to walk, he'll collapse. Chelsea is saying something to him, but he can’t make it out. It’s just a bunch of muffled sounds. It’s too late.  
  
The next thing Evan knows, he’s in the visitor’s station in the back room, alone. He’s not sure how long he’s been sitting here, but no one has come to get him. They probably don’t have time to waste on him with the rest of the festival going on. All he's done is make a scene and force someone to take care of him. He wishes he could shrivel up and disappear on the spot.  
  
Eventually, one of the people taking tickets agrees to switch jobs with him. Chelsea ushers him over to a table at the front, out of sight of the stage, where he stays for the remainder of the afternoon. The second ticket taker glances up as Evan sits down stiffly a few feet away and all Evan can think is that this guy knows exactly what happened, that Evan got stuck here because he’s a nuisance who simply can't handle more than this. And now he’s going to sit here and be numb and slow because that’s what he does best-- he makes people uncomfortable and he panics for no reason. Evan ends up being three times as slow as the other guy because his hands still haven't stopped shaking. People start to bypass him and eventually he’s doing nothing but sorting money and stacking tickets. It’s easy. He doesn’t have to speak to anyone. It’s also mortifying.  
  
At the end of the day, Evan comes home to a still-empty house and for once he’s glad his mom isn't home. He dumps his backpack on the sofa and slides to a seat on the floor next to it. The quiet that he’d been content to drown in earlier now presses in from all sides, oppressive and miserable. He’s drained from having panicked earlier and the frustration mingles with it to create this festering state of distress that makes him claw at his temples. He stares at the carpet in front of him for a good few minutes before the feeling comes to a head. His hands ball into tight fists, looking for something to drive his anger into. Punching the side of the sofa a couple times only makes him feel worse, so he presses his hands even harder into his head and lets out an ugly screech for no one’s benefit but his own. Evan's pain fills up the house for a moment, but the silence rushes back in behind it, unrelenting, the living room as resolutely empty as before. Everything is the same as he left it. It's like he's not even here, like this was never real. The house easily smothers his voice, so he gets louder until he's out of breath and he's got tears tracking down his face. He wants to tear himself apart into a billion little pieces, or at least break something in this stupid empty house instead. If only he could open up his skull and lobotomize whatever part of him is so broken.

A quiet ping from his backpack breaks the silence again. Evan fishes his phone out of the side pouch. It’s his mom-- she won’t make it home for dinner tonight. That’s becoming the norm lately so it’s not a surprise, but it means Evan has about three more hours to himself. At least she won’t be around to wonder why he doesn’t want to eat. 

Evan tosses his phone across the sofa and settles in to continue stewing over his day. He’s well aware that it’s not the best thing to do, but he’s too exhausted to put on a brave face right now. Getting up and _taking a walk_ or _writing a journal entry_ like he should would feel like wading through sludge the whole way. It’s the right cure for what he’s feeling but it’s just too bitter of a pill for him to take. His head feels like it’s been filled with wet sand, so heavy it hurts to move. It’s somehow magnitudes worse than it was this morning. How is he supposed to get any better when every time something like this happens, it sets him back for weeks of effort? He’s tired of being like this. It’s no way to live, thinking from one mistake to the next, one panic attack to the next, one crowded room to the next… and they all keep getting bigger and bigger. 

He’s not getting better. He’s getting worse, and he’s the only one who can ever know. If his mom knew, she’d worry, and that’s not what he wants. He wants to convince her he doesn’t need to see Dr. Sherman anymore, that all the therapy she paid for has finally worked, but that’s an uphill battle when you’re dealing with someone that’s professionally trained to spot lies. It’s like Dr. Sherman has a hidden camera that tells her exactly how many meals he’s skipped that week. She’s good at her job, but not quite good enough to help him. She might have to be a miracle worker for that.

Evan can imagine exactly what his mom would say if she were home. She’s already been talking about how _this will be his year_ and how he’s going to meet so many new people at school, as if none of the trouble he’s had matters anymore. None of that is true, because that’s not the way Evan’s life works. No, he walks into crowds and panics. He stumbles over his words until he’s red in the face and no one hears what he says. He sweats when people look at him too hard, like they’ll see right through him if they try. He’s a mess and Evan wonders if maybe he belongs alone because he’s simply too much for anyone to handle-- not even himself. _You have so much ahead of you_ , his mom would say, _all this is going to feel so far off one day, just you watch_ , but it’s all bullshit. Evan digs his nails in at his palms hard enough to hurt as another wave of tears hits. There’s nothing ahead of him but more of the same in a slightly different setting. How is he supposed to plan for college when he can’t stand to think of anything past a couple of days, much less this fall? School starts in less than two weeks and just the thought of those crowded halls makes him want to panic all over again. 

The nausea sets in for real this time and doesn’t leave him all night. Evan skips dinner and pretends to be asleep when his mother gets home. The next day is warm and sunny. He sleeps until the mid-afternoon. That evening, he still sort of feels like breaking something so he goes to the park by himself and climbs the tallest tree he can find.

At some point, his brain registers that _this is getting dangerous_ and his hands start to shake. Before long, he’s sweating through his T-shirt from the thrill and not just the heat. And hell, it feels _good_ \-- to be afraid for a real reason instead of just a crowd. He keeps climbing. Branch after branch, his footholds become harder to find and the branches thin to the point that he can wrap his entire hand around them. 

Eventually, he reaches up at an odd angle and his lower foot slips, sending him into a sprawl. He scrambles to clutch the trunk of the tree, muscles aching and heart pounding in his throat. His stomach does a little flip as he finally glances down at the ground far below. The color swims in his vision, a soup of fading sun, underbrush, and earth that seems like it’s a mile away. He pants, breath high in his chest for a slow minute as the adrenaline floods his system. 

He hadn’t been paying attention to how high up he was getting, but it must be forty feet down from here. He almost fell all that way. He could’ve died just now-- _that’s far enough, isn’t it? How high do you have to be to die?_ \-- If he’d fallen, that could have been it. The thought washes over him like a cold rush of water, chilling him from head to toe despite the summer heat. 

It could all have been over-- just like that, just a slip of his shoe. That’s all it would have taken. All he has to do is make one mistake. 

Evan’s grip on the branch above him slackens. All at once he feels weightless, feels the empty air yawn open behind him, ready to swallow him up into nothing. He lets his lower foot slip just a little. His heart reacts, skidding and stumbling in protest. In the space that fear should occupy, though, Evan’s chest lightens. His next breath is full and natural for what feels like the first time in months.

He imagines stepping for a branch that isn’t there, and he falls. 

 

• • •

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> forgive that this is devoid of dialogue and not a direct addition to the plot. Evan's struggle is just so fucking personal to me and I FELT this. (also I thrive on angst.) this is here for a reason I swear. 
> 
> these have been short chapters but more is coming very soon. thanks for reading! <3
> 
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


	4. Smoking Drugs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Connor smokes crack pass it on  
> 

“Did you hear what happened? I was _right. there._ Hunter had blood all over his face!” Alana chatters, taking a seat at the end of the lunch table. “Poor guy.”  
  
“You were? Were you in his class?” Evan wonders.  
  
“No, but I saw him yesterday. His nose was still bleeding. And I was like, right next door when it happened.”  
  
Jared points at Evan with a plastic spoon from where he stands. “Bet you’re glad you didn’t get involved with that bullshit. Connor broke somebody’s nose. I heard he broke a window too.”  
  
“He didn’t really, did he?” Evan says.  
  
“Who knows?” Jared takes a bite of his food and proceeds to talk with his mouth full. ”But he definitely broke the kid’s nose. Have you seen him? Looks like a clown with that shit on his face.”  
  
“Evan, you talked to Connor?” Alanna asks.  
  
“N- well, not really.”  
  
Alana widens her eyes and blows out a dramatic breath. “He was really dangerous. I’m surprised he hadn’t dropped out, honestly. He was in remedial classes.”  
  
Evan frowns. “Why are you talking about him in past tense?”  
  
“Didn’t you hear? He totally got expelled.” Alana says.  
  
Evan’s heart drops. “Where did you hear that?”  
  
“Dana P. was in the office for a dress code violation. She heard the whole thing.”  
  
“You must be so relieved,” Jared laughs, “At least you don’t have to worry about him outing you anymore.” He grins to himself, tossing his trash into the bin before turning and sauntering off.  
  
“What does that mean?” Alana asks, interest sparking.  
  
“O-Oh, nothing, Jared’s just-”  
  
“So you two did talk?” Alana leans in, talking over him.  
  
Evan shoots a glare at Jared’s back. He’s already across the room, mixing in with the rest of the crowd.  
  
“No, no, Jared’s just e-exaggerating.” Evan explains.  
  
“He signed your cast!” Alana gasps, staring at Evan’s arm.  
  
Evan knits his brows and almost laughs. She just noticed?  
  
“When did he do that? How long did you know each other?”  
  
“W-We didn’t. It was, uh- I think it was the first day. He was just being nice-”  
  
“Oh Evan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to gossip. I didn’t know you were friends.” Alana continues unabated.  
  
“No, w-we didn’t talk. He just signed my cast, I swear.” Evan tries, a bit louder this time.  
  
“Oh.” Alana blinks, then tilts her head at Evan. “Are you sure?”  
  
Evan’s face reddens a little after having to speak up. He worms his finger in the lip of his cast to scratch an itch he can’t reach. “I-I mean, we talked once or twice.”  
  
Alana puts her hand flat on the table and speaks slowly, making more eye contact that Evan is comfortable with. He stares down into his own half-eaten lunch.  
  
“Well I’m sorry for saying that about him. I didn’t know you knew him.” Alana says.  
  
“N- I- It’s fine.” Evan gives up.  
  
Alana leans back and opens up her own lunch. She pauses to take a few bites, and then launches into another topic without giving Evan more than a few seconds to relax.  
  
“So are you excited for spirit week? It’s going to be so great. I already have a list of the themes since I’m on the yearbook committee...”

  


• • •

  


Connor isn’t in school the next day, or the day after that. When the weekend rolls around and he isn’t there on Monday either, Evan starts to wonder if Alana was right. The rumor that he got expelled gains momentum and by the latter half of the week, people have already moved on to talking about the homecoming dance instead. Evan stops mentioning Connor along with the rest of the school and slowly stops looking for him to show up again. He does wonder what might have happened if he’d talked to Connor when he had the chance, but doesn’t let it bother him too much. Ultimately, he tries to deny that the idea of Connor being gone makes him a little disappointed. After all, since last Wednesday when he’d seen Connor looking so-- just _wrecked_ , he can’t shake feeling the slightest bit of regret.  
  
Things at school start to ramp up for homecoming in the next few days. Friday is the pep rally, and the morning is just chilly enough that Evan can see his breath. He decides to take the bus to school for the first day that semester instead of braving the cold on his bike.  
  
The halls are swimming with green and gold outfits and uniforms in the school colors. All the sports teams came to school in uniform, some with stripes painted on their faces-- as did the cheerleading team, much to the delight of some of the more rowdy guys. Evan even spies Zoe Murphy in her outfit for jazz band, all ready to perform at the pep rally. Excitement is a high note in the air for the whole school.  
  
As a side effect, the halls are an even more treacherous place than usual, people hooting and roughhousing as they go just because they can. Evan has to stick to the sides and wait so that it isn’t uncomfortably tight or loud. By the middle of the day, he’s a little tired of all the noise. It ought to be a good day, but hearing about all the people who got asked to homecoming or all the pranks that went on today just makes him feel that much more invisible.  
  
At lunch, Jared brags about how he and his "friends" played a prank on a few cheerleaders, as if it’s an accomplishment. Alana rushes past, snapping pictures of the both of them for yearbook before they can react. Evan finishes about half of his lunch before getting bored with it and putting his head down instead.  
  
When it comes time for the pep rally, the entire school filters out through the field to where the bleachers are set up around the football field. Evan walks along with the crowd while Jared breaks off to mix in with his friends, and Evan ends up stuck in the upper left of the seats, sandwiched between strangers who all seem to be engaged in their own cliques.  
  
Once the lines have all filled into the bleachers, the announcer starts up and so do the cheers. Most of the people around Evan stand up to clap. The ones towards the front jump and shake the bleachers. Evan is just barely able to see Jared down there making a racket along with a line of other guys who are hanging over the rails, leering at the cheerleaders in the front of the show.  
  
Evan keeps his backpack on his lap, trying to take up as little space as he can so that no one brushes him. The group in front of him all have their phones out, roving around trying to video the field. He has to move out of the way of their elbows more than once during the opening speech. While he’s trying to lean away, someone else to his left accidentally hits his arm, making him flinch into the backs of the people ahead of him. He apologizes, but it’s too loud for anyone to hear. They don’t seem to have noticed him at all.  
  
The entire crowd stands again for some reason that Evan can’t hear and everyone starts to chant. The bleachers creak under the weight of the rambunctious groups at the front. The sports clubs must be starting to come out onto the field. Evan can’t make out what the announcer is saying but she’s struggling to be heard over the poor mixing of the music, causing some ugly feedback. He has no space to put his bag, and being the only one seated makes the lack of space even more uncomfortable. Everywhere he looks is another person’s back, or a moving body that’s blocking him. The constant swaying of the bleachers is also making him feel a little nauseous...  
  
One more loud cheer from the crowd seals the deal. Evan squeezes out the far side of the bleachers, trying to avoid bumping as many people as possible. He drops his backpack and then hops down from the third row so that he doesn’t have to go down past the teachers. The sound of the rally fades as he walks down towards the school, the shouting and the music muffling into choppy swells of sound that reflect off the tall back face of the school. He picks his way towards an outcropping on the side of the building, feeling kind of floaty and breathing a bit harder than the trek necessitates. Evan turns the corner into a small alcove next to the door for a stairwell so that the sound is less direct. The bass notes still vibrate a bit more than he’d like, but this is better. This he can handle. In fact, it’s almost pleasant from this distance, being able to hear it vicariously without the added discomfort of being inside that crowd.  
  
Evan flattens his back against the brick of the school and takes a deep breath, laying his head back. It’s still clouded over from that morning, so the sun hasn’t had a chance to burn the cold off, leaving Evan a little chilly. It would be nice to leave early, but he still has to wait for the day to end so that he can catch the bus. He closes his eyes and takes another slow, steadying breath, trying to get the nerves to leave him. His hands had just begun to shake, but he was lucky that he left early enough to keep it under control for the most part.  
  
Evan’s next breath is tinged with an unpleasant smell and-- _is that_ \- _marijuana?_ \-- He opens his eyes and is startled to see a figure leaning against the same wall as him about ten feet away, smoke rising from their lips.  
  
“O-Oh, sorry, I-” Evan jumps and reaches for his backpack.  
  
“‘Sfine,” Connor slurs, waving lazily.  
  
Evan stands there halfway holding his backpack long enough that Connor speaks up, answering the unspoken question on Evan’s face.  
  
“In-school suspension.”  
  
“Ah.” Evan looks away guiltily, letting his backpack slide slowly back down to his feet.  
  
Another roar of applause erupts from the track and a new, even more bass-heavy song starts Evan rolls his stiff shoulders as he debates finding a new place to skip the pep rally. He’s still having trouble just shaking off the surprise of Connor appearing out of nowhere. There might be a better place to have an anxiety attack-- somewhere inside, where it’s warm and quiet.  
  
Connor looks Evan up and down, taking stock of how stiffly he’s breathing. One of his hands is twisted in the bottom of his shirt and he looks like he’s just one more strike from losing it. Connor takes a few slow steps towards him and wordlessly holds out the hand with the joint when Evan opens his eyes.  
  
Evan gapes. It takes him a second to realize that Connor is offering.  
  
“I-Is that weed?” Evan says stupidly.  
  
“No, it's crack cocaine. That's why it looks and smells like weed,” Connor deadpans.  
  
Evan is nonplussed. He stares at it like it’s something from another universe.  
  
“ _It'll help_ ,” Connor singsongs.  
  
“Help what, blacken my lungs?” Evan rambles, instantly stammering in shock at his own words.  
  
“Yeah, the early death is half the fun.” Connor shrugs.  
  
Evan laughs once. “No, no thanks.”  
  
“Suit yourself.” Connor leans back against the wall a few steps away.  
  
Nothing more is said, and within a few moments Evan starts to squirm in the silence once again. He wonders if he’s imposing on Connor, just standing there not talking. Maybe he should leave. Is Connor waiting for him to leave? How could he tell?  
  
The marching band has started a song down on the field and the crowd is on their feet, probably welcoming out the major sports teams by now. There’s some disorganized chant going on, but it’s too muffled to make out. Evan is suddenly very glad he’s not over there anymore because it’s a lot louder than it was before. A short minute later, the audience quiets down and something else starts up on those awful speakers.  
  
Evan watches Connor take a short drag and then slowly breathe the smoke up into the air in a dense cloud. He doesn’t look so bad right now-- definitely not compared to Wednesday. _In-school suspension_ … does that mean he’s been sitting somewhere in the office every day this past week? Evan looks down and notices a bandage across Connor’s hand, covering his palm and knuckles.  
  
“You could be a little less obvious,” Connor says.  
  
“Oh u-u- s-sorry-” Evan startles.  
  
“If you’ve got something to say, then say it.”  
  
“N-no, no, I didn’t-”  
  
“No, go ahead. Everybody else already did. You’re entitled.” Connor rocks his head back to sit it on the wall.  
  
Evan doesn’t say anything. He cautiously takes another glance at Connor’s hand.  
  
Connor lifts the bandage up in explanation. “Put my hand through a wall.”  
  
“Oh,” Evan breathes.  
  
“Yes, I broke his nose. No, I didn’t break a window,” Connor recites. Evan looks at him in confusion. “I calmly opened it and dumped Hunter’s shit outside.”  
  
Evan snickers despite himself, then clears his throat nervously when Connor doesn’t laugh with him. He’s concerned that Connor is pissed off at him for a moment, but Connor hasn’t moved. His eyes are glazed, bloodshot, and red-rimmed-- he’s shamelessly high, Evan realizes.  
  
“Satisfied?” Connor asks, taking one more puff and putting the joint out.  
  
Evan can’t think of anything to say. The music at the pep rally ends, giving them a beat of quiet.  
  
Just then, the heavy door to their left squeaks open. They both jump about a foot in the air. Connor sputters, covers his mouth and then stands up stock straight, holding his breath.  
  
“Evan?” Mrs. Kelly says-- and then more sternly as she looks between them, “You know you two can't be out here unsupervised.”  
  
Evan looks back at Connor, whose face is going red, fumbling for an answer. The anxiety registers with Mrs. Kelly and she frowns for a moment. Evan sees his opening.  
  
“S-sorry, I just left, I-I couldn’t deal with the crowd,” Evan stutters, trying to give a guilty smile.  
  
It's not a complete lie after all, just a bit of a stretch. It seems to work. Mrs. Kelly glances over at Connor, drawing her brows together, and Evan jumps in for him.  
  
“O-Oh, he’s, uh, helping. Is it okay if we hang back here? We won't cause any trouble.”  
  
Mrs. Kelly screws her mouth up and inspects the two of them for another second. Connor stands completely stiff right at Evan’s side, practically begging.  
  
“Alright…” she allows finally. “But don’t run off. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”  
  
“Thanks.” Evan smiles weakly.  
  
“Not a problem.” She gives the both of them-- mostly Connor-- one last pointed look and then turns for the football field.  
  
Connor waits, watching after her for a few steps, and then he’s spluttering and gasping, letting disjointed puffs of smoke out. Evan looks to make sure Mrs. Kelly doesn't turn around while Connor groans dramatically.  
  
“Oh god, I thought that was the end," Connor rasps, still doubled over.  
  
Evan laughs so hard he almost cackles before he can stop himself. Connor takes a water bottle out of his bag and downs about half of it in one go. He huffs in relief afterwards and gestures at Evan with the top of the bottle.  
  
“That lie was perfect.”  
  
“I-It wasn’t really a lie. More like, uh, maybe half of a lie.” Evan scratches his arm. “Mrs. Kelly just likes me. She’s nice.”  
  
“I’m surprised that worked. She hates my guts,” Connor says. “You must be teacher’s pet.”  
  
“Ha, you could say that...” Evan admits.  
  
Evan leans back against the wall a little bit heavier this time, flexing his fingers subconsciously. He'd slipped up with his breathing for a minute there. He never got a chance to fully recover in the first place.  
  
Connor drops the water bottle back into his bag and ducks the strap over his shoulder. “You wanna get out of here for a minute?”  
  
Evan stutters in surprise, looking almost pained at yet another intrusion. “B-But she just- uh-- I-I have to catch the bus.”  
  
“I've gotta wait for Zoe. We won't miss it.”  
  
Connor walks past and snaps up Evan’s backpack without another word.  
  
“Wha- I-”  
  
“C’mon,” Connor calls, swaying drunkenly under the added counterweight. He dangles Evan’s backpack at arm’s length, waiting for him to catch up.  
  
Evan scrambles after his bag. Connor stops to drop Evan’s backpack strap into his good arm. He waits while Evan fidgets with it for a moment.  
  
“Wh-Where are we going?” Evan asks finally.  
  
Connor smirks to himself. "Don't worry about it."

  


• • •

  


Evan follows Connor in through a back door and down a short, dim hallway to the side of the gymnasium, bypassing the locker rooms. The empty halls make Evan's heart rate kick up in his chest, but Connor seems oblivious to the fact that they could get caught at any moment. Whether that’s because he’s high or because he’s done this a million times is up for debate. 

They round a corner a bit past the far side of the gym to reach a dank stairwell that Evan wasn’t even aware existed back here. There’s a half-size basement window at the top of the stairs, but the bottom is dark and dusty with no overhead lights to be used. Evan feels the tightening of nerves in his stomach, a pending panic attack still on the horizon, but he follows Connor down into the pit of the stairwell anyway. 

A heavy, windowless door sits at the bottom of the steps and Connor pushes it in with no effort at all-- the latch apparently broken, allowing the door to just lay there against the frame. Evan slinks in behind him, his shoes landing on a soft mat covering the floor. Connor hits a switch by the door and three rows of heavy, caged light bulbs gradually come on in the ceiling, most of them in different degrees of disrepair. The one at the end flickers and gives out, leaving one of the corners dim.

Now that the room is visible, Evan recognizes the layout. it’s a relatively small room lined with gymnastics mats, meant for wrestling or tumbling or something like that. There’s a patchy ring of white paint in the center that was probably used for wrestling matches some time ago. The entire room save for an alcove around the door is covered in rectangular mats. The walls alternate green and yellow with mats about as tall as the door, while the floor is plain black. It’s kind of ugly, to be honest. It’s no wonder it’s in disuse. 

“Welcome to the wrestling room.” Connor tosses his bag down as he walks in, gesturing around in a circle.

Evan paces, taking in the state of the room. Everything smells like dust and there’s a thin layer on most of the surfaces. Little bundles of it sit on the top lip of the mats that line the walls. A few seams on the mats have come apart too, leaking yellow foam that's stained with spots of decay. 

“We had a wrestling team?” Evan asks.

“In 2001. Hasn’t been touched in a decade,” Connor explains. “Probably water damage or something.” 

Connor kicks at a frayed piece of yellow mat that’s hanging off at the bottom of a wall, then stoops to pick up a volleyball that's been abandoned towards the far wall. It looks a little stiff, but it still bounces when he dribbles it a few times.

“Uh- shouldn't this be locked?” Evan wonders.

“Probably. I broke it when I was a sophomore and no one ever fixed it.” Connor throws the ball down a little harder so that it bounces up above him. He catches it in the air and lines it up on the floor in front of him. “It's a good place to skip class.” 

“Oh, is this where you go instead of lunch?” Evan asks, but then backtracks. “I-I mean, not that, uh- I-I just noticed-” 

“Yeah, I go smoke and then come down here and take a nap... or kick things if I feel like it.” Connor takes a measured step back from the volleyball. “Look out.” 

Evan retreats into the doorway, instinctively shielding his left arm. Connor kicks the ball at full force and watches it ricochet loudly off both walls before hitting the floor. He stops it and kicks it off the wall to get it in his hands. Evan swallows dryly, startled by the abrupt noise, and tries not to fidget. They're away from the pep rally now, but it occurs to him that Connor might not be the best person to ride out an anxiety episode with. It’s not as if Evan thinks Connor is dangerous, however he can't help but feel a little threatened.

Connor spins the ball between his hands and then gestures for Evan to receive it.

“O-oh, I, uh- I can't really...” Evan raises his cast in explanation.

“Then just kick it.”

“Uh…” 

Connor rolls the ball towards Evan and he gives it a tap. It bounces gently off the wall to return to Connor.

“ _Weak_ ,” Connor teases.

Connor stops it with his foot and then punts it again into the opposite wall. Evan flinches visibly this time. This is definitely not where Evan needs to be. He’s not sure what he expected, blindly following Connor down into some abandoned part of the school. Jared will have a goddamn field day when Evan tells him about this experience. He gives an uncomfortable sigh and worries his lip. What has he gotten himself into?

The ball finally comes to a stop a few feet from Evan. Connor slicks his hair back with both hands, stumbling a little as he turns, and puts his hands up for Evan to kick it at him. Evan sort of laughs at how blatantly high Connor is, deciding that it was naive to expect him to understand anything about being anxious. In that state, he’s missing even the obvious tells of discomfort that Evan has started to let through. It’s not the best respite from the pep rally, but he supposes it’s at least worth something.

Evan drops his backpack next to Connor’s and kicks a little harder this time. The shot mostly misses but Connor slides over to hit it in midair. It sails straight up into a light fixture with a loud clang and an awful rain of dust that falls out of the ceiling. Evan claps a hand over his mouth with startled laughter as the light thrashes, but Connor just hits the ball on the way down, sending it ricocheting again. 

Connor keeps the ball up, standing in one spot and waiting for it to pass close enough for him to swing at. Evan sticks to the side, mostly just watching and kicking it back into play a couple of times. And as he watches, he realizes he’s seeing another new side of Connor. He knew Connor smoked-- a _lot_ \-- but right now he’s almost manic, high to the point that it strikes Evan as clearly not recreational. A person doesn’t get this high in the middle of a school day just for fun, they do it because it’s an escape, because the alternative of being sober is unbearable. Evan sinks his teeth into his top lip, recalling seeing his father come home and crack open a beer before even sitting down. His parents used to fight over it all the time, and it hasn’t been until recently that Dr. Sherman convinced him the addiction wasn’t just a character flaw-- that it wasn’t because he needed to be drunk to deal with being at home.

The ball lands near Evan once more and he finally hauls off and gives it a good kick. It zings past Connor, smacking into the brick near the ceiling. 

“That’s it!” Connor whoops. He hits the next one with his fist instead. 

Evan chuckles. He’ll admit, he’s feeling a little better even though this isn’t his usual approach to an anxiety attack. 

Connor gives another reckless kick and has to duck his own shot, sending him teetering down to the floor. He lets himself collapse into breathless giggles, chest heaving with the activity. Evan laughs along with him, even though it's all a little unsettling. The hazy, half-crazed look in Connor's eyes sticks in Evan’s mind right next to the memory of the dim classroom from Wednesday. While Connor doesn’t look upset like he did before, there’s still something off about him. The roughhousing and the laughter is just a shell. In fact, Connor’s mood seems so fragile that Evan wonders if he could just crack Connor open if he tried. How much would it take, just a little push? Evan almost wants to do it, like pouring a catalyst into a beaker in chemistry class to watch it bubble over. _Pour test tube A into beaker C. Record results._

Once Connor has caught his breath, he picks his hands up and waves groggily around. “There should be a nice padded room like this in the middle of the school. Y’know, like back in elementary school when they had that room with all the bean bags where they just let you wear yourself out.”

Evan does recall his school having a room like that. They’d put the autistic kids in there whenever they had meltdowns so that they could do just that, wear themselves out hitting foam objects instead of themselves. Evan had gotten stuck in there once or twice too, when he’d had a breakdown during school and couldn't stop crying. He remembers having his first real anxiety attack in that room. His mom had to come pick him up halfway through the day when he was in second grade, just a few weeks after his father left. The memory is still vivid and humiliating after all these years. His mother had slowly tiptoed in, looking even more frazzled than usual, the concern painting her cheeks red. She’d picked him up in her arms, even though he was getting too big for that, and hauled him home with tears in the corners of her eyes. He hated that room. It was the first time he felt like he was mixed in with the problem kids and that feeling never left him.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” Evan agrees, instead of explaining. He follows suit with Connor and sits down against the wall.

“Like a time out room, yeah... Those would be useful...” Connor drawls. 

It seems that Connor, by contrast, is intimately familiar with that part of his elementary school. Evan wonders exactly how far back the problem runs. Did he have even more meltdowns as a child, or is it the other way around? How often does he use this room for that purpose now? Evan looks over at Connor, his hair a tangled mess on the mat around him, and wonders what it must be like inside his head. Luckily, he’s too zoned out to notice Evan staring.

“Y-You spend a lot of time down here?” Evan attempts.

“Yeah, I freak out at school pretty often if you weren’t already aware,” Connor quips.

“O-Oh no, that’s not what I-- I-I’m sorry, I just-”

Connor swipes the ball towards Evan in a subtle attempt to help him start over. Evan catches it and then shyly sends it back.

“Yeah, I like it down here so don't tell anybody. The teachers will close it up if they find out.” Connor struggles to reach the ball where he lies, kicking at it until it skids away in no particular direction. 

“O-Of course not. My lips are sealed,” Evan promises.. 

There’s the hum of a phone vibrating in Connor’s bag and he groans, throwing one arm over his eyes. “Hey, throw me,” he slurs, holding his other arm straight up with an open hand.

Evan carefully picks it out of the front pouch despite the fact that there’s a big spiderweb crack in the screen and slides it across the mat on the floor. It doesn't quite go far enough and Connor grumbles and crawls his hand over to it.

Connor holds his phone up over his face, reading a text. A second later, he rolls his eyes and lets his arms plop back down at his sides. The faint commotion of people in the hall past the gym begins to filter down to them from the half-open door. Evan checks the time on his own phone, seeing that it’s closing on three P.M.

“You gotta go?” Evan says.

“In a minute.” Connor doesn’t move a muscle. 

“I-I should go catch the bus.”

“‘K,” is all Connor says. 

“I'll… see you?” Evan offers.

Connor points a sluggish wave in Evan’s general direction, eyes closed against the lights in the ceiling. Evan waves back awkwardly, and then scratches at the edge of his cast for an uncertain beat before finally leaving.

  


• • •

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Im an an insecure POS so leave me a comment or something <333
> 
> thanks for reading! you're awesome!! have a great weekend!!! *:･ﾟ✧
> 
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


	5. Just a Mirage

The moment Zoe spies Connor picking his way through the crowd towards the parking lot, they both know they’re in for a battle. She can see from a mile away that he’s disheveled, swaying slightly as he walks, his pace a little slower than normal. Zoe locks her phone and shoves it into her pocket, already glaring at him with speechless, open-mouthed anger.

“Hey,” Connor chirps, showing her a blithe smile.

Zoe snatches in a breath as if he’s cursed at her, and then inhales again to start yelling at him.

“Are you serious?” Zoe speaks through her teeth, glancing around to make sure no one else is watching them.

Connor does a stellar job of pretending to be deaf, getting into the passenger side of Zoe’s little silver two-door car without so much as blinking. She follows, yanking her door closed as she plops into her seat. She takes one sniff of the air and scoffs loudly, looking Connor over in disgust.

“My car’s going to reek. What were you thinking?”

Connor doesn’t react, just blinks blearily in the watery afternoon sun that makes it through the thick cloud cover. The world looks like it’s in grayscale, made of patchy layers of paint against a plain off-white sky. Zoe watches Connor’s eyes glaze over and scoffs yet again, opening the front windows a few inches even though it lets in a cold breeze. Connor leans his face on his hand and stares listlessly out the window.

“Mom and dad are going to kill you. I thought they took your whole stash.” Zoe shakes her head. She puts the car in reverse and starts to pull out.

“‘Nah”

“Jesus, Connor,” Zoe huffs at the slur in his voice. She starts the car and deflates with a heavy sigh.

They make the turn out onto the main road and the cool wind tosses Connor’s hair around in front of his face. Zoe rolls her window up a few more inches but Connor just lets it tangle his hair up even worse than it already was.

“You’re going to be in such deep shit if dad’s home,” Zoe adds.

Connor’s only response is a noncommittal grunt into the side of the hand he’s leaning on. Zoe leans a hand against her forehead and returns her focus to the road instead of him. Instead of merging onto the larger road, they stay on a less direct route which takes them on a sparse, winding road with forest to either side. Connor watches the overcast neighborhood of trees and little houses rush past them, imagining that the whole world blurs into shades of gray outside the car. Everything is the color of the asphalt, interrupted only by stray cars and the lines of tree trunks as they flash by.

A short drive later, they roll up the driveway and Larry’s car is indeed sitting there in the garage. Zoe turns off the engine and slumps in her seat.

“I can go get you a different hoodie so you won’t smell as much, but he’s going to know if he sees you.”

“No point. S’fine,” Connor mumbles.

“It’s fine? Dad is going to murder you.”

“And?”

Zoe grunts in frustration, thumping one hand against the steering wheel before getting out of the car, already starting to storm her way towards the house. Connor exits the car wordlessly, trailing his bag in one elbow without bothering to close his door.

“Do you do this on purpose?” Zoe continues, gearing up for a rant as Connor follows after her. She digs into the back to get her backpack and then walks around the car to throw both her door and Connor’s closed.

“Love it. My favorite.” Connor smiles humorlessly at her.

Zoe rolls her eyes and marches for the door, going quiet. 

Connor sways deliberately between his feet as he stands in front of the door. “You done?” he taunts.

Zoe all but growls at him as he stands in her way. “Connor.” 

“Go ahead, start.” Connor presses. She’s got a problem, she just won’t say it. She’s always got a problem with him.

It doesn’t take long for the standoff to have an effect. Zoe takes in a big breath and and speaks, looking past Connor at the door. “You just ruined the whole night and you know it. Mom and Dad are going to be fighting. Again.” 

Zoe’s voice echoes hollowly off the concrete of the garage as she slowly starts to raise her voice, her hand clenched around the strap of her bag like a lifeline. She stands her ground halfway between him and the car, but won’t get any closer. 

She’s terrified of him. He’s known this for a long time now, but it still stirs the fire, turning up embers that glow hotter and sting when exposed. 

“Sounds like their problem,” Connor says. 

He leans his head against the cool surface of the door to the house, unwilling to open it and risk losing the last line of defense between them and their parents. The high from earlier is hardly helping anymore, he just feels like everything is too bright and he needs to lay down. He wants to fall into bed and not move for the rest of the night, but there’s always some yelling and slamming that comes first. Their house hasn’t had a quiet night in a long time.

“You couldn’t keep it together for one day?” Zoe says, then breathes out, mostly to herself, “Today?” 

For a second, it seems like the argument has stalled before it could hit the tipping point. Connor puts his fingers through the front of his hair and tugs. If it’s a fight Zoe wants, it’s a fight she’ll get. All he’s got to do is prod a little harder. 

“You sound like dad,” Connor fires back. “I had a shit day.”

“Oh, you had a shit day?” Zoe instantly picks the rant back up at that one. “What is that supposed to mean, you actually went to class today?”

“It means you could shut the fuck up.” 

“The bar is literally as low as it can possibly be.” Zoe throws her hands out to the side and stares him down. He’s gotten her started. It’s never really hard to do, these days. There’s always something under the surface just waiting to be fanned to life. “You act like you’ve got it so hard but you just do whatever you want. All you have to do is go to class and mom’s just overjoyed.”

“Oh, here we fucking go.” Connor pushes the door open and continues standing there in the way. If Zoe’s going to play this card, then maybe Cynthia will act to his advantage. “Can we skip this today? I'll take a rain check on your little miss perfect shit.”

“You’ve never had to do well in anything.”

"Oh wow, It must be so hard,” Connor sneers. “God, people like you. You've got half the eleventh grade fawning over you. That must be terrible, I'm sure.” He steps into the living room and deliberately closes the door on Zoe, still talking. ”Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

Zoe bursts through after him, already starting to gnash her teeth, ready to yell. For all the shit Connor gets for having a short fuse, in reality, Zoe isn’t much better. The difference is Connor breaks things when he’s mad. Zoe just yells a couple of times, bursts into tears, and then shuts herself in her room. 

Connor treads on through the living room, hitting the stairs before Cynthia can peek her way out of the kitchen.

“Kids?” Cynthia calls distantly. She comes around the corner to just miss Zoe marching up the stairs behind Connor.

Zoe gives a muted shout, closing her teeth over the sound. She follows Connor all all the way into his doorless room, where he paces a short circle, nowhere left to go. 

“Do you know what it's like to be your sister? That’s how people know me. I’m just the sister of that guy who keeps getting suspended. I have to go behind you and apologize.”

“No one asked you to do shit for me,” Connor turns around and snaps. “And you have to apologize, fuck, I must make you look fantastic!” Connor mocks, stomping at the mess of random clothes on his floor. He slams his bag down onto his bed.

Zoe retreats a step, but gets louder in response. “You just keep making everything worse! You never stop to think about anyone but yourself!”

Connor clenches his eyes shut for a split second. At once, the room feels tiny, everything in it raw and exposed, most of all him.

Zoe barrels on, the fuse already burned away and anger sparking, unable to stop. “What happened? When did you decide everything had to be all about you and your stupid temper tantrums?!”

Connor’s head spins, like maybe they never actually got out of the car and everything is still zooming past him too fast to notice. But it’s not gray now, it’s too bright, yellowed out by indoor lights that trail unpleasant halos. Zoe’s voice blurs into the haze, and soon so does he. He watches himself round on Zoe like a fuzzy neon after image taking his shape.

“Zoe, what’s-” Cynthia yells as she comes up the stairs, but her voice is lost under Connor’s.

Connor slams his hand against the closest wall and throws some random items from a bookshelf in Zoe’s direction. “I get it already! You’d _kill_ to be an only child!”

Zoe jumps out of the way even though the books land at her feet. “I just want one normal night and you always have to ruin it!”

Cynthia pokes her way into Connor’s room behind Zoe. “Connor,” She tries.

Connor punches the bookcase again at yells at his mother this time. “Fuck off!”

“Hey!” Larry booms, stomping up from downstairs, and _here comes the real shitstorm._

Cynthia and Zoe part like accordion doors to let Larry come barging in. Zoe storms off towards her own room and Connor is left with his parents circling him in. 

“What’s going on?” Larry demands.

Connor turns away from the door, trying to keep his face out of view.

Cynthia looks between Zoe’s bedroom and Connor’s and calls towards Zoe. “What happened?”

There's some mumbled response from Zoe, but it's too muffled for Connor to make out. Larry steps towards him grabs him by the shoulder, making him face forward. Connor yanks himself away, but Larry is already shaking his head in disappointment.

“You’re high,” Larry realizes. “Jesus, Connor.” 

Connor flops down onto his bed in defeat. Larry keeps on, gearing up for a long battle that Connor is disastrously unprepared for. 

“I thought I made myself clear last time. This is unacceptable.” Connor mouths the _this is unacceptable_ bit along with him, miming the way Larry always points when he’s mad.

Larry scoffs. “You’re grounded.” He throws the hand he was about to point with out to the side. “I don’t know what else to do with you.”

“What’s the matter, ya run out of things to take away?” Connor taunts.

Larry ignores the jab. He walks past Connor, pointedly stepping over the mess of miscellaneous clothes, books, and food wrappers on the floor. “Are you happy like this?”

“Larry, come on.” Cynthia tries to pull him away, but he shrugs her off. 

“No, I’m curious.”

Connor closes his eyes and zones out as hard as he can. If he tries, maybe he can pretend he’s not really here and Larry is yelling at no one. Connor is no one. 

“Do you get some kind of satisfaction out of all this? What are we supposed to do?”

 _Nope, nobody home. Try again later._

“Larry, please. Don’t badger him,” Cynthia chimes in. “We just want to understand, Connor.”

_Sorry, no one by the name of Connor here, just a mirage._

“He’s not even listening. This is useless.” Larry turns back towards the door, where Cynthia is picking up the books that Connor tossed to the floor. “Stop that. He can clean that up himself.” 

Cynthia puts the books away where they belong anyway, letting Larry huff about it as much as he wants. 

“We don’t have to fix everything he breaks.” Larry takes the last book in her hands and drops it next to Connor on the bed. Walking past Cynthia, he mutters, “we should have left Zoe’s door like it was.”

Connor’s eyes snap open. The haze in his vision tunnels. He stands, swaying with the abrupt change in position. Cynthia reaches for him to help keep him from falling, but he bats her hand out of the way. Connor doesn’t hear his father yelling at him for it anymore. All he hears is himself. 

“Get out. " Connor raises his voice. He takes the book Larry dropped and throws it at the wall next to Larry’s head. "Get out, _get out_!!”

Larry and Cynthia both flinch and Larry instinctively sweeps Cynthia behind him. Connor tears the books Cynthia reshelved back out and punches the empty bookcase, blind to Larry’s attempts to stop him. He punches a lot of things. He also screams, but the words don’t really matter anymore, if there are any. He’ll remember them later, when Cynthia brings them up in her weekly intervention. Underneath all the yelling, there’s the quiet click of Zoe’s door opening and then shutting again as she escapes downstairs and outside. _Good._ Connor screams even louder and rams his fist into the wall next to his bed until his hand bleeds.

They rage back and forth for a long time. How long, Connor’s not sure, but at some point Larry snaps at the wrong person, Cynthia rushes off in tears, and then Connor is finally alone. He collapses back into his bed and stares straight up at the ceiling, feeling his heart rate start to slow for the first time in the past hour or so. Cynthia and Larry retreat to some other part of the house where he can’t hear Cynthia weeping-- one of the benefits of living in a three-story house: you can avoid each other if you want. Connor blinks tiredly, everything gradually slowing down and slipping back into place, leaving his mind empty from the exhaustion. He feels like he’s just skipped forward in time and the whole fight was just a bad dream. He wants to keep skipping. Hit the gas pedal, ignore the road, and black out.

Cynthia calls him down for dinner a few hours later, but he doesn’t respond. No one comes to get him. He hasn’t moved, and he doesn’t intend to. He can hear the whole affair anyway, since he doesn’t have a door to act as a barrier. The distant sounds of hushed voices and forks scratching against plates wafts up the stairs, the tension of Connor’s absence practically a tangible sound.

Finally, Cynthia breaks the silence. “How was school, Zoe?” 

Connor can almost imagine the sight of Zoe pushing her gluten-free lasagna around, elbow on the table, miserable. “Well, we had the pep rally…”

“Oh, how did that go? Did you perform?” Cynthia grasps feebly at the distraction.

“Yeah...” Zoe drones, ”I got nominated for homecoming queen.”

“That's great, honey!” Cynthia beams. 

Connor feels... _something_ tug at him but it's too buried. He's too exhausted to dig at it. The conversation fizzles out pathetically. Connor can’t tell if Larry is even at the table. There’s a good chance he’s eating dinner in his study downstairs. 

When it sounds like dinner has come to a close, Connor forces himself upright and shoves a few books off the foot of his bed. If he turns the light out, Cynthia might be generous enough to leave him alone when she comes up to bed. He goes for the light switch, pushing things out of the way with his feet to make a path. 

Most of the items that had once been on his bookshelf are scattered around his floor. He’ll put the books back later. The clothes can stay. The pens and pencils are a little bit annoying to walk on, though. An array of school supplies that must have been on his desk had apparently spilled into the middle of the floor sometime during the argument of the night. He almost steps on the multi-tool his dad got him for Christmas a couple years ago, the tools splayed open where it lays. He’s sure that had been on his desk. He picks it up along with a handful of pens that he doesn’t want to walk on later. The pens go in a cup on his desk. He pauses for a good five seconds, but when he hears footsteps on the stairs, he keeps the multi-tool.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another short chapter, just noplace else to put it. here take it. 
> 
> are short, constant updates annoying? probably. is it an effective way to stay on the 'recently updated' page? yep. am I doing it on purpose? nope. thanks for reading!
> 
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


	6. • • •

The homecoming dance that weekend comes and goes without much ceremony for Evan. The majority of Saturday, he’s at the park working, packing away the last of the summer paraphernalia. The last of the night, he’s spending surfing Facebook and YouTube in his room. 

Alana has already posted plenty of wholesome pictures of the event, commending each part of the organization team. The crowd seems rather sparse but the decorations look nice. Alana looks fantastic in what she wore, some light blue affair that’s flattering but not too tight. Evan gives that picture its first like. A few members of the student government appear in the pictures with her but she’s always the one with the brightest smile. 

Jared didn’t go to the dance because “it's fucking lame anyway”, but attended a rowdy after party according to his instagram. There are a few photos of him and some guys who go to their school at a house party. None of them look even close to old enough to be drinking, but if the typos and the frequency of blurred out pictures are any indication, at least Jared was plastered. 

“Oh my goodness, take a look at what I found….” Heidi cooes, walking into Evan's bedroom. 

Evan slams his laptop closed before she can see anything incriminating. “What’s that?” 

Heidi is holding a small picture book open, an item that Evan just barely recognizes. It was one of Heidi’s scrapbook projects from several years ago, when she’d been interested in the hobby for a few months. Heidi takes a seat next to Evan on the bed and holds the book out for him to see. It’s a array of family pictures from when he was very little. The page she’s looking at is filled with photos of several consecutive Halloweens that were taken out in front of their old house. His dad is even in the first one. 

“Remember when you were five, you were-- Van Gogh? Is that the one?” 

Heidi taps her finger on one of the oldest pictures, in which Evan is dressed up in a hilariously bad Ninja Turtles costume. He wasn’t tall enough for the shell part of the costume and he remembers stubbornly teetering around in it all night long. 

Evan chuckles. “I was the red one. Raphael,” he corrects.

“And then next year it was Wolverine…” Heidi points down the line, grinning. “and then it was… What even were you here?”

Heidi stops on one of Evan at probably seven years old, in a black hooded cape, holding a red masquerade mask over his eyes. He’s posing dramatically for the camera instead of smiling like in all the others. Evan cringes. He remembers that year. 

“Ugh… I think I made that one up.” He scratches his head, remembering being absolutely delighted to explain his own personal superhero to anyone who would ask. Believe it or not, there was a time when he was a bit more outgoing. Now it just makes him slump his shoulders. ”That was ridiculous. I was so short.”

“Oh, I remember! You used to draw those pictures and write little stories about him.” Heidi laughs. “What did you call yourself?”

“I-I don’t remember.” Evan does remember, he’s just trying to block it out.

“You loved that costume. You remember you tried to wear it in the house all week?”

“Don’t remind me,” Evan complains..

“Aw, I think you made a very handsome… whatever it was you called it. Look how happy you were with that cape!” Heidi points at the way seven year old Evan holds the cape out in the wind. Evan rolls his eyes and smiles reluctantly.

They take a look at the opposite page where there are a few more pictures of their old house, taken in similar spots out front as the yard changes a bit each time. One year it’s suddenly their current house, the yard still a little sparse and the two of them crowded onto the porch, and then there aren’t any more.

Evan’s mom looks over at him for a long moment and smiles fondly. “How’d you grow up so fast?”

“ _Mom_ ,” Evan groans.

“Alright, alright.” Heidi ruffles his hair, standing and leaving him with the picture book. She’s already in her scrubs for tonight. “Oh, right!” She stops herself, remembering something. “Look what I found online today-- college scholarship essay contests. Have you heard of these?”

“I think so…” Evan says uncertainly.

“NPR did a whole thing about it this morning. There are a million different ones you can do, a million different topics. I spent my whole lunch break looking these up.” 

Heidi gives Evan a handful of pages, eagerly summarizing the awards and requirements of each as she she does so. 

“Wow…” Evan takes them from her one by one and skims over the prompts, trying to smile along with her. 

“College is going to be so great for you, honey. How many times in life do you get the chance to just… start all over again?”

“No, I know.” Evan rifles through the papers as she hands them over, faster than he can read very much, feeling his chest start to tense up with guilt.

“You’ve got so much, so many wonderful things ahead of you…” Heidi continues, starting in on one of her short rambles about Evan’s future. He tries to keep up, but it’s the same thing he’s heard a million times. All it does is make him want to tune out.

Finally, Heidi slows down, realizing that Evan is overwhelmed with papers by this point and he’s not sure which one to look at. He’s staring into the middle distance between two of them instead. 

“Yeah, you’re really going to find yourself in college. I really think so… I mean, I wish I could go with you, but...” She pats him on the shoulder, trying to pull the conversation back in. “I just thought these were… It seemed like a neat idea.”

“It is. For sure,” Evan assures her, even though he’s beginning to feel a little shaky. He splays the papers out on the bed instead so that it’s not obvious.

“You’ve just always been such a wonderful writer. And we’re going to need all the help we can get for college. Unless your stepmother has a trust fund for you that I don’t know about, with all those fabulous tips she made cocktail waitressing…” Heidi laughs. 

Evan laughs with her, trying to block the idea of his stepmother as well as the idea of college out of his head at once.

Heidi looks him over and thinks for a second, but then brightens back up. “Hey, you know what? Why don’t I bag my shift Tuesday? When’s the last time we did a Taco Tuesday?”

“Oh, you don’t have to,” Evan mumbles quickly. 

Heidi ignores his response and cheerfully helps him arrange the papers back into a neat stack. “No, you’ve been back at school for a week and I’ve barely seen you. Maybe we could even start brainstorming those essay questions together.”

Evan stammers a little, trying to politely wave the idea off. He’ll do them, just for her sake, but he’s not keen on the idea of sitting around for an hour and consciously avoiding the fact that they can’t afford what Heidi wants for him. And beyond that, the idea of college has been looming on the horizon all year long and he’s spent most of his time deluding himself into thinking it may never actually arrive. Heidi is so excited for him, so certain that he’s got great things ahead of him, but graduating next year feels like a massive tidal wave that’s going to wash him out to sea. Talking through these essays would feel like lying for a whole night straight. He already is, lying-- smiling up at his mother and pretending like the idea of the end of the year doesn’t make him feel sick.

But Heidi just keeps beaming at him despite his efforts, and he knows it’s already settled. Heidi has decided it’s a good solution. If he refuses, she’ll know something’s amiss. So Evan agrees, plastering on a smile. “Th-That would be great.”

“Oh, good. That’s exciting-- I’m excited. There’s something to look forward to.”

“Yeah, me too.” Evan collects the papers and places them on his bedside table.

Heidi gives a short sigh in satisfaction and palms her keys. “Well, don’t stay up too late.”

“I won’t.”

“I love you,” Heidi tries. 

“Love you too,” Evan waves to her but doesn't look her way.

Heidi hesitates in the doorway and looks back at Evan, who is already back on his laptop clicking away. She purses her lips in thought, seeming to deliberate on what she wants to say, but then decides against it for now. She leaves him as he was and heads off to work.

  


• • •

  


School on monday is dull in comparison to the excitement of last week. Instead, people are busy passing gossip around-- who went to the dance together as a couple, who showed up high, who got a little too drunk at the after party. It’s preferable to the noise, by Evan’s standards. 

Evan sits down to lunch in his usual spot. It doesn’t take long before Alana shows up to sit across from him, which has become a strange norm of theirs this year. She must not have friends in this lunch period, Evan guesses. He doesn’t really mind-- the opposite, actually. Alana has a wonderful talent for filling silences. Sometimes she even lets him get a word in edgewise.

Jared plops down into the seat next to Evan as per norm, his perpetual smirk even bigger than usual. “So, you hear about Jake’s party?” He asks, as if it’s clearly common knowledge.

“Uh, no, I don’t think so. I-I saw those pictures you posted,” Evan responds.

Jared’s face lights up like the fourth of july, but he tries to hide it by crossing his arms. “Dude, it was _wild_.” 

Evan smirks to himself, gearing up for another one of Jared’s tall tales. He always teases Evan for being the book nerd, but Jared is the one with a real propensity for storytelling.

“You weren’t _there_ , were you?” Alana stares at Jared dramatically. “Didn’t someone get arrested?”

“Two people. And the second one totally could’ve been me,” Jared says. Alana gapes at him and Jared smirks in response. “I got so fucking lucky. Okay, so...” 

Jared leans in to start weaving a story, so Evan takes the opportunity to sit back and open up his lunch. Alana nods enthusiastically, eating up each piece of gossip and correcting names as he goes. She seems to know something about almost everybody. Jared’s story touches on a couple of other happenings that Evan has overheard people talking about in class, mostly irrelevant things about people he hardly knows, but who Jared almost talks about like friends. 

Evan retains only bits and pieces of the beginning of the story, but it ends up that Jared and “a couple of the other guys” had to scatter when the cops dispersed the party. According to Jared, they’d each hopped the fence into a neighbor’s yard and only the ones that hopped the other fence got caught. There’s clearly some embellishment in there somewhere, but Evan nods along and looks surprised at the right intervals. Alana is completely engrossed, stopping him to ask rhetorical questions every few sentences, which he agrees to with a little too much delight.

Jared’s monologue comes to a close with a few final theatrics. “And it turns out someone called a fucking _ambulance_ , and it’s on the other corner, so here I am trying to get out of these people’s back yard without letting their dog jump me, and I still don’t have my shoes on...”

“What did you do?!” Alana urges him on.

“I let the dog have one of my shoes and hopped the gate. Walked all the way home, drunk as a skunk, carrying one shoe and some random girl’s jacket... Lucky.” Jared leans back, satisfied with himself. 

Alana shakes her head in disbelief. Evan chuckles, raising an eyebrow. 

“You lost a shoe?” Evan asks. 

“Well I went back for it later, clearly.” Jared finally takes a bite of his lunch, but then grunts in recollection and walks off with food in his mouth.

That leaves just Evan and Alana in a resulting silence, which Evan immediately tries to rectify. He throws Alana some bait.

“S-S-S” Evan catches on the first word when he speaks up and has to start over. “So, how was the dance?”

“It was great!” Alana beams, happily jumping into a description of the night. She talks about a whole slew of people whose names Evan recognizes only a few of. There isn’t much to say, other than what everyone already knows about who went with whom, so Alana derails that trail of conversation pretty quickly. “It didn’t leave me a lot of time to study, though. You remember our English test is this week, right?”

“Oh yeah…” 

Evan hasn’t forgotten, but it’s not like he’s worried. English is his strongest subject and he’s read _Frankenstein_ three times over by now. Worse, though, that reminds him he has a smaller presentation to give in social studies tomorrow. He’s been trying to avoid the thought of it all and hasn’t even started the work. 

“Did you start the midterm project yet?” Alana asks.

Of course. That one, Evan _has_ been able to avoid thinking about for the most part. The teacher has just started mentioning the assignment, a four page essay and presentation that’s due in December. He hasn’t even looked at the requirements yet. All he knows is it’s a major grade and half of it is based on the presentation portion. He pauses in eating his lunch, a twinge of anxiety making his stomach revolt.

“N-Not really-- not yet,” Evan answers. 

“It’s due in five weeks,” Alana reminds him. “Did you pick books for it yet?”

“N-Not r-- no.”

“We have to compare two different styles within a genre so I chose Ray Bradbury and Oscar Wilde. I’m getting them approved by Mr. Greene today since they’re not on the pre-approved list. The paper should be easy, but I’m worried about fitting it all into a speech...”

Alana starts into detailing her plans for the presentation, and Evan lets himself zone out a little bit. 

Across the cafeteria, Evan is surprised to spot none other than Connor, who is getting talked at by one of the lunch monitors. It looks like he’s just walked in, despite the fact that it’s been at least ten minutes since the bell rang. Evan had almost forgotten Connor shared this lunch period with him, as rarely as he shows up for it. When the teacher finally lets him go, he shoulders his way through the crowd and plants himself in the far corner by the windows. 

Connor has started showing up to school on a regular basis these past few weeks, to the tune of many interested whispers and gossip. He doesn’t miss days like he used to, presumably because he’s on thin ice after getting suspended. In fact, he’s been to school every day for the past two and a half weeks, which for him is probably a record. Connor even shows for study hall now, though he usually just sits there on his phone. Once or twice, he exchanged a short wave and a greeting with Evan, which Evan is honestly still milling over. It’s still highly unusual to see him at lunch though. He mustn’t have been able to make it to the wrestling room, Evan guesses. Connor sinks into his seat and lays his head on one arm, blocking Evan from his view. Evan returns his attention to Alana, but his mind starts to wander even further off track.

Here Evan goes again, noticing Connor a little too much. He still hasn’t decided if it’s that he’s genuinely interested in Connor or if it’s some kind of morbid curiosity about his reputation. At first, he was fixated on the contrast between Connor’s moods, but he still hasn't seen Connor act the way he did when he signed Evan’s cast-- not really. He hasn't been the same since the day Evan caught him in the middle of that meltdown. For one, he’s been even more perpetually high than before. He reeks of marijuana every time he passes by. The second bit, again, Evan can’t really put his finger on, but after last week’s session with Dr. Sherman, he’s getting closer to understanding. 

It’s pretty clear Connor is going through something. Evan feels like he's only scratched the surface, and now that he knows there’s something really going on, he wants to dig at it. Dr. Sherman interpreted what he told her as him wanting to be friends with Connor, but Evan worries it’s more selfish than that-- that it’s because what he sees in Connor is _familiar_ \-- not the meltdown, not the violence, but the part that came afterwards. He wants to break Connor’s shell because he’s desperate for someone else to feel like he does. Maybe that’s the reason why every time he sees Connor at school, he launches into a long trail of these thoughts. And what is Evan supposed to do with this instinct? He's not sure it gives him the right to talk to Connor, but it doesn’t stop him from having this inane impulse to _check in_ with Connor, even though Evan knows for sure they aren’t there yet. 

Evan remembers the stale advice Dr. Sherman gave him when he explained all this-- _Just say hi. What's the worst that could happen?_ Evan’s not sure, but a whole list of things she’s taught him to label “intrusive thoughts” line up to answer it. Among them, Evan thinks, what if he catches Connor at the wrong time and he ends up snapping at him like before? He’s sort of aware it's not really a rational concern, but it's there. He shooes away the thought that Connor will dislike him because he’s generally boring and depressing to talk to, although that's the main one. Still, what if people start lumping him in with Connor and harassing him for being crazy too? Evan wouldn’t be able to handle it if everyone knew. What if this whole obsession is just creepy and-

“Evan? What do you think?” 

“Huh?”

“Did you zone out again?” Alana asks, still as upbeat as when she began. He’s missed the majority of what she said, but she doesn’t seem fazed. 

Evan frowns at the fact that Alana apparently expects that out of him. “Sorry.”

Jared clanks down a new soda can on the tabletop and gets back into his seat. He follows Evan’s stare towards the corner, straight at Connor who is seemingly asleep. 

“Are you for real right now?” Jared jabs Evan in the arm, making him look back at their own table.

“Uh- What?” 

“What are you doing staring at Connor again?” Jared gestures in Connor’s direction and Alana follows their line of sight, leaning over so she can see him through the crowd.

“Wh- I-I wasn’t-” Evan stammers. ”Wh-What do you mean again?”

“I don't get it, did he start bullying you or something? Is there blackmail involved?” Jared asks, cracking his soda open. 

“I thought you said you didn’t talk,” Alana adds.

“W-We don’t. Well, we, uh-” Evan clears his throat. “We talked a little bit.”

“What’s a little bit?” Jared asks.

“We- uh- we skipped the pep rally and--” Evan stops himself short, changing his story when he realizes the wrestling room should probably stay secret from Alana. “We kind of hid out back and talked. It was alright. He’s really not so bad.”

“You skipped the pep rally?” Alana gives Evan a disappointed look.

“ _You_ skipped a school function?” Jared taunts. “Look out, next thing you know you’ll be buying weed off Connor.”

“I’ve skipped class before,” Evan mumbles.

“Evan, skipping is dangerous!” Alana interjects. “You can get detention for doing that.”

“Aw, skipping’s healthy. You only get in trouble if you’re stupid about it.” Jared shrugs, digging back into his lunch.

Alana shoots Jared a glare and changes the subject. “Anyway, as I was saying earlier-- What do you think of my thesis? Is it the scope too big for the presentation? I was thinking about scrapping it for a different idea but I was wondering what everyone else was doing. Have you chosen your topic yet?”

“Uh, I…”

“It is pretty far off, but it’s never too early to start. Especially if you might change your topic. And we have two more novels to read for class before then. We could-”

“Hey. C’mon, maybe let up a little.” Jared puts a hand up to slow her down, then gestures at Evan, who has stopped eating. “You're gonna make the poor guy panic.”

“Oh no, I’m sorry! Was I stressing you out?” Alana switches gears instantly.

“N-No, no, it’s-” Evan’s face heats up with embarrassment. He wasn’t going to panic or anything, maybe not quite so extreme as that, but his hands were starting to sweat and _thanks Jared for calling attention to it._

Alana continues, her focus actually on Evan now. “I had no idea! What are you so nervous about?”

“I-I’m not- It’s fine, really, ” Evan insists, though he’s convincing no one. 

“You write so well, though,” Alana barrels on. “I peer reviewed papers with you a while ago and you’re one of the only ones in that class with proper grammar. It was good! And I know how to write-- I took a whole workshop over the summer-- so trust me, you've got nothing to worry about.”

Evan gives a weary smile. “Thanks, but I’m really fine...”

“It's the presentation, right?” Jared tosses something for the trash bin and misses, grumbling as he reaches over for it.

Evan huffs, defeated. “Yeah... I-I’m not so good at public speaking,” he tells Alana.

“Oh,” Alana cooes. She tries to catch Evan’s eye for another one of her _candid_ moments but Evan is determined to avoid it. He does like her, but it sort of feels like she’s speaking to a toddler when she does this. “Well don’t worry about it, I’ll be there the whole time. You can just focus on me. We could study together sometime, if you want.”

“Y-Yeah...” Evan still can’t look her in the eye, but it’s a nice sentiment. It helps, a little. 

Jared doesn’t let that moment sit for long before he’s off talking about the Halloween parties coming up in a couple weeks, and Evan is able to put the worry out of his mind for now.

  


• • •

  


The next day, the social studies presentation has Evan starting the day in a daze. He wakes up to frost covering the grass, the first streaks of the morning turned pink by approaching cloud cover. He’s already dreading school the second he opens his eyes to snooze his alarm, and hating himself for it because it’s such a small thing to be so anxious over. No one but him would worry about a short presentation this much, but it’s causing him enough grief that he almost wants to skip the whole day. 

The first half of the day is tense, and he’s too shaken up to eat very much at lunch (what else is new.) Jared slaps him on the back as he leaves for his last two classes, wishing him luck and telling him to “break a leg-- but not really, you don’t need any other broken limbs.”

When it’s his turn to present, he manages to get through it without any major hitches, but only because he ends up almost panicking the class before and wearing himself out ahead of time. His heart still pounds and his hands shake as he holds the paper, but he’s too exhausted to notice the class’s reaction to it. He’s sure his face is red too, but all he can think about is speeding through the words in front of him. He mumbles his way over most of the information, reading directly from his paper, and probably receives a subpar performance score. At least it’s over. 

There’s only one period left in the day after that, and Evan feels dulled enough that he decides he’d rather risk skipping than struggle his way through college algebra at half brainpower. Without pausing to think, he waits for the halls to mostly empty out, then slips off through the back of the gymnasium, down the stairs, and into the familiar dusty smell of the wrestling room. It also smells a bit like weed this time-- surely Connor’s doing at some point earlier in the day-- but it’s not so bad. Evan lies flat on his back right in the middle of the wrestling circle and closes his eyes, basking in the quiet. 

_A time out room_... He’ll have to thank Connor for dragging him in here one day.

He lets his mind go blank, focusing on the feel of the mats under his back in an attempt to ground himself. It works, for the most part, however he tunes out so hard that he loses track of time. When he finally realizes he’s hearing commotion in the halls, it’s already a few minutes past three. He snatches up his backpack and rushes back through the school, only to find the last of the busses turning out of the loop without him. _Great._

Evan plops his bag down on the steps outside the school building and pulls his jacket out of the bag. Just as he pushes his hand through the end of the second sleeve, he gets a text.

  


_*Sorry, I have to go straight to class from work. There’s leftovers in the fridge. See you at 9!_

  


She forgot. _Of course she did._ Evan already has two of the essays drafted-- five pages of writing that he’s thrown together in the past three days. He was looking forward to letting her look at them. It was supposed to make her happy. 

Evan takes a seat next to his bag and sighs, the breath forming a cloud in front of him. He’s going to have to walk home now and it’s freezing. There’s no point in telling his mom that he missed the bus-- all it will do is make her feel guilty. He’s not going to mention the essays either. She doesn’t have to apologize. It’s not like it’ll matter anyway. Just to top it off, he feels a raindrop hit him on the top of the head. 

_Fantastic. I’m going to catch the flu._ The cynical voice in Evan’s head takes over. 

The exhaustion from the rest of the day lingers in his limbs, making the trek home sound like a marathon even though it’s probably only a few miles. 

_It was a normal day_ , he reminds himself sourly, _a normal day that shouldn’t have been tiring, except it was because I’m a mess_. 

“Hey.”

_If I can’t even handle that then how am I ever going to-_

“Evan.”

Evan finally turns, almost scrambling forward when he finds Connor standing there on the step above him. He stares in surprise for a moment but then rushes to respond, sticking on that first syllable again. “W-W-Wh-Wh-”

Connor picks up the slack. “You got a ride home?” He swings his keys from a short chain, pointing off into the parking lot with them.

Evan blinks stupidly at him. “Oh, I-I’m fine. It’s not that f--” he backtracks mid-phrase, “Y-yeah, I do.”

Connor raises an eyebrow at his jumble of an answer. “You do?”

“It’s fine.” Evan scratches his neck, a little embarrassed at having failed that lie so quickly.

“You sure? It’s fucking freezing.”

“Oh, I-It’s not that far…” Evan lies, his hand still resting on the back of his neck. The jacket he brought today isn’t nearly heavy enough, leaving his neck exposed to the wind since it lacks a collar.

“But it’s not close… Gonna start raining soon,” Connor reasons. “C’mon, I’ll drive you.” He waves Evan on from over his shoulder, already starting down the stairs. 

Evan starts to stutter all over again but cuts himself off. Connor turns back and raises his eyebrows expectantly. After a second, he splays his hands out as if to say “ _so?_ ” Another cold raindrop hits Evan’s exposed shoulder. When Connor turns again to keep walking, Evan follows, jogging a few steps to catch up. 

”Thank you.” Evan makes the effort not to stutter that part, at least. 

“No problem,” Connor mutters, hitting the button to unlock his car.

Connor leads Evan to an unexpectedly bland, dark blue car. The entire back seat is full of fast food wrappers and papers, and when Evan opens the passenger door he wrinkles his nose at the smell of stale marijuana, but it’s still a nice car. Connor slings his bag into the back seat while Evan gets into the passenger side, gripping onto his backpack straps like a lifeline. All at once, Evan feels he’s awfully out of place. He shifts his backpack around to his lap while Connor gets into the driver’s seat. 

The instant Connor starts up the engine, music blares out of the radio-- some fast, guitar-heavy, song with screamed vocals and Evan can’t help but jump. Connor mumbles a vague apology and turns it down to a more reasonable level as he shifts into reverse. Evan buckles himself in robotically, but to his alarm, Connor doesn’t bother. He turns in his seat as he carefully backs out of the parking space, taking care to navigate the cramped lot. When they’re out, he finally does buckle his seatbelt and Evan is somehow surprised by it. It seems kind of incongruous based on what he knows about Connor, but Evan hadn’t really known what to expect. Does Connor always wear his seatbelt? Does he blast that music all the time? This is what he wanted, isn’t it? To see connor being himself?

Once they’re free of the space, Connor asks, “So where to?”

“O-Oh, uh-- Magnolia?” Evan answers.

Connor nods. “That’s pretty not-close. Were you really gonna walk?”

Evan has before, but not in such bad weather. He hunches his shoulders. “Sorry.”

Connor turns out of the lot behind a line of other cars. “You’re actually not that far out of my way.”

Evan grips onto the outside of his seat as Connor accelerates onto the main road, trying to cover for it by keeping up the conversation. “Wh-Where do you live?”

“Ruxton.”

Evan recalls the kinds of houses you see on that road. He thinks he was aware that the Murphys were well off, so it’s not a surprise. 

“Yeah, that’s not so far,” Evan mumbles. He unhooks his fingers from the edge of the seat as Connor makes an acceptably smooth turn and hugs his backpack instead.

Connor takes them through a short suburb and onto a narrower, forested road that will take them to Evan’s neighborhood. Again, it's strange to see Connor being a careful driver-- Evan almost expected him to be aggressive at the wheel by default, but he’s completely fine. He doesn’t seem high right now either. Evan notices Connor’s right hand on the steering wheel, the knuckles unbandaged but covered in scabs. Evan can’t tell if it might be from what he saw at the pep rally or if it’s new. Luckily, either Connor is too busy driving to notice, or doesn’t care that Evan is staring this time. 

“You can change that if you want,” Connor offers.

“What?” Evan chirps, quickly looking back at his side of the car.

“The radio. You probably hate that stuff.”

“Oh, no. I-It’s fine.”

Evan picks compulsively at a fraying string on the edge of his backpack and stares down into his lap. Drizzling rain starts to patter against the windshield as they drive, tiny droplets that create a soft hiss of white noise to fill in the relative quiet, clashing awkwardly with the music. It would have been a miserable day to walk home without an umbrella. Connor glances over just once and Evan feels nerves twist in his stomach. The silence is killing him. 

“You are just fucking shaking, Jesus.” Connor nudges Evan in the shoulder with his damaged fist and Evan flinches hard, too stiff to be jostled. ”Chill. I’m not gonna get you killed. I’m a good driver.”

Evan laughs nervously, the sound almost bubbling out of him against his will. “Oh, n-no, no, th-th-th-” He clears his throat and tries again for what feels like the millionth time. “That’s just me all the time... You’re actually not a bad driver.”

“Surprised?” 

“Wha-Why would uh-- I-I mean, I- Of course not, ” Evan rambles, then huffs in exasperation at his own struggle.

Connor just smirks. “Don’t be too shocked. I’m dialing it back for you.”

“O-Oh, you don’t have to, uh- Well, actually...” Evan rethinks the sentence as he says it.

“You don’t want me to dial it forward,” Connor remarks. “ I normally do sixty down this road.”

“ _Sixty?_ ” Evan squeaks. It’s only a two lane road and it’s not exactly a straight shot.

Connor laughs once. “Yeah. Gotta get your thrills somehow, right?”

“I wouldn’t know...” Evan remembers the way Connor was the pep rally a few weeks ago and hugs his backpack a little tighter.

“I mean, if you’re gonna be dangerous you’ve gotta go all out. At least then if you get caught, you had some fun.” Connor steers with one hand, leaning his other elbow on the window as if the effort of driving properly is utterly boring.

“I guess that’s... one way of looking at it,” Evan allows. “Yeah, don’t-- don’t do that.”

“Just for you,” Connor promises sarcastically. “You’re lucky Zoe was out sick today. Normally I don’t get to drive.”

“No?”

“Nah, my parents confiscated my keys.”

“Oh...” Evan knows better than to ask why. If Connor’s the type to put his hand through a wall, he probably doesn’t get along too well with his parents.

“How far down?” Connor asks. They’re on Evan’s street now.

“Oh, it’s like, uh… halfway. I’ll tell you.”

Evan points out his house and they roll up to the curb outside.

“Thanks again. Uh-” Evan says, still staring into his lap. He can’t manage to look directly at Connor just yet, but he makes an effort at least.

“Mm-hmm,” Connor hums, shifting into park. He drums on the steering wheel to the beat of the new song that comes on with his index finger.

Evan unbuckles himself and climbs out, carefully arranging his backpack onto his right shoulder. When he’s out, though, he turns back and deliberates for a second, long enough for Connor to lean forward to look at him, so Evan tries to push the words out of himself before he can think them through.

“D-Did you maybe, uh- maybe want t-t-t-” Evan stops, takes a short breath, starts again. “Maybe want t-t-t-” Once more, he doesn’t change the sentence, just sticks, “want t-t-t-t-”

Evan clears his throat, feeling his face flame up, and starts for the fourth time to no avail. He just keeps stuttering on that same word-- it’s not even an _important_ word, he just can’t get over it for some stupid reason. It’s raining a little harder now and his clothes are getting kind of damp, not to mention he’s also letting rain into the car which is rather rude. He should probably give up and let Connor leave or else they’ll be here all afternoon at this rate. He just can’t _stop_ and it’s awful, it’s fucking humiliating being this blatantly hopeless, he doesn’t know why he even tries, and-- is he hallucinating or is Connor _smiling at him?_

It’s not like the way Jared might smile while watching Evan flounder like this, nothing so sarcastic, but sort of bemused, like he’s trying to decide if Evan is real. He waits politely until Evan finally sputters his way to a stop, red-faced and partially drenched, but he doesn't say anything at first. Evan fully expects him to start laughing and drive off.

Instead, Connor puts his arm out into the passenger space with an open palm and wriggles his fingers expectantly at Evan. “Phone?”

Evan straightens up and fumbles to get his phone out of his jacket pocket. He hands it over and watches Connor type on it for a few seconds before locking it and giving it back.

 _It couldn’t have been that easy._ Evan blinks at his own phone as he takes back it from Connor like he’s not sure it’s really his.

“I’ll see you?” Connor says.

“Yeah, um-- thanks.”

Connor nods, sinking back into his seat. Evan steps backwards into the soggy grass of his yard and throws the door closed. Connor pulls away, turns back towards the bigger road at the end of the block, and then he’s gone.

Evan dries his phone on his pantleg as he walks up to the house and unlocks the screen to find a text sent from his phone to an unknown number-- a string of random emojis from his most used list, meaning it’s mostly the generic smileys and the thumbs up. It ends with three consecutive thumbs ups though, so he guesses that’s a good sign. The conversation sits there untouched at the top of his messages until the next morning.

  


• • •

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to rewrite this bit a few times bc it's connecting the real shit to the beginning. things should move a little faster now though. (you can skip to the good parts if you're bored literally just ctrl+f+"connor" lol. it's okay, I approve ^-^; )
> 
> thank you so much for all the comments and kudos! i'm shocked how many of you there are tbh. it makes me happy that anyone at all is reading. thanks, you're the best!!! <333
> 
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


	7. • • •

Evan hates English class.

Well, actually, that's not fair. In the past, English has always been his favorite subject. What he hates is this specific class: fourth period honors English with Mr. Greene. He just had to get Mr. Greene this year. 

See, Mr. Greene's classes focus on _participation_. He's notorious for being one of the most authoritarian teachers in the whole school and he's hell-bent on making this class feel like college, where apparently participation grades are paramount. If you don’t raise your hand in class or if your presentations-- which there are a _lot of_ \-- are lacking, your grade suffers. Evan has a B so far, despite being up to date with all the reading and getting As on almost every assignment he gets back. He's never been one to obsess over his GPA, but it's still kind of irritating to get anything other than an A in an English class. It's even worse to dread walking into the room every day. And he can't afford to skip either-- Mr. Greene deals out detention slips like nobody's business. Nobody skips his class. Nobody texts. Nobody talks without raising their hand. People hardly even ask to use the bathroom.

It's not that Mr. Greene is totally unlikable or especially mean, though. He does have a sense of humor. However, it doesn't help that he's an intimidating figure to boot. Mr. Greene is a heavy-set, slightly graying guy with a booming voice to match his heft. To make matters worse, he also seems to be hard of hearing, because whenever someone with a quiet voice (Evan) speaks up in class, Mr. Greene pushes them over and over to talk louder. When he calls on Evan, Evan feels like he has to scream for Mr. Greene to let him talk, and that makes his face go red and then he starts to fidget and, well, everyone knows where that ends up. 

The worst part, though-- the part that makes Evan glare daggers at the back of Mr. Greene's head sometimes-- is that he just loves to pick on the quiet students. He seems to delight in shocking someone by calling on them when they don't have their hand raised, or asking an extra question to make someone think on the spot, all the while smiling at them while he does so. And then he has the gall to compliment the ones he's just harassed like some kind of backhanded consolation. For once, Evan's not the only one who gets shaky when they do presentations, and it's _terrible_.

And all this is such a shame because Evan really does like English. Things like interpreting novels and writing essays have always come easy to him. All the way back through middle and elementary school, it was his favorite subject. One of the only things he's done in school that he's proud of was a short story he wrote in eighth grade that won a flash fiction contest. It's still poking out of a stack of books on his shelf at home. He used to write all the time, before his self-loathing streak really matured. Back when he was little, he used to read to get himself to sleep when his mom had to work the late shift. While his dad snored away in front of the living room TV, Evan sat under his blankets, reading more than a grade level ahead of schedule by the light of a flashlight. While his parents talked over each other in sharp whispers in the next room, Evan imagined himself up a superhero, a magician, a boy wonder who could snap his fingers and turn back time. He'd spend the night scribbling away into his schoolbooks until he drifted off to sleep with his face pressed into the spine of a notebook. And when he slept the first few nights in a new bed in a new house that felt nothing like home, he picked up _A Wrinkle in Time_ and re-read until he fell asleep thinking about traveling the universe to visit distant stars instead of how far away his old bedroom, his old school, his old back yard, all were. Needless to say, the books he keeps stacked across the back of his desk are special. 

So, while he doesn't dare raise his hand in class, that doesn't mean Evan hates the assignments. For as self-important as Mr. Greene is, his assignments are actually pretty thought-provoking. Evan has taken Alana up on discussing _Frankenstein_ at lunch once or twice in the past month. Despite how much he hates the class, he still enjoys the subject matter-- which is saying a lot, because he doesn't feel a lot of passion for much of anything these days, much less classic novels. But Alana has that affinity for just talking and talking when someone lets her get going, and Evan was so unused to being engaged in one of her conversations that he kept throwing more fuel into the fire. By the time he realized he'd been talking for maybe a minute straight, it was already too late. Alana was positively lighting up as he talked, bursting with more things to say, but somehow managing to let him talk, which is rare. And, well, when Alana's really excited, it's hard to want to stand in her way. 

Alana keeps telling him he should say all that while they're in class, but he just can't make himself volunteer. He's already set a precedent for being one of the quiet people. Everyone would stare. Mr. Greene would smile like he's proud that all the times he's badgered Evan have paid off when really it's the _opposite way around_. If this were a different class, if he still had Mrs. Kelly instead, he might suck it up and put himself out there despite all that. Instead, all he can think is that those participation points are far more trouble than they're worth. It's depressing, realizing that this is what the class boils down to for him, that he hates what used to be his favorite class. Getting stuck with Mr. Greene has taken away the one subject Evan usually put effort into and turned it into just another reminder of how broken his brain is, another reason to hate himself. It's not fair. 

Evan's phone vibrates in his jacket pocket, making him almost jump out of his skin. Mr. Greene absolutely lives to confiscate cell phones. It was quiet, though. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s noticed. Mr. Greene is talking, writing something on the board, and a few other people aren’t paying full attention. Evan pulls his phone out while Mr. Greene's back is turned and is confounded to find out it’s not his mother or Jared texting him, but Connor.

_*hey u never texted me  
*why_

Evan frowns down in confusion at the conversation. It’s been a total of seven days. Evan hasn’t so much as clicked on the conversation since then, considering they went back to mostly ignoring each other at school. Not to mention, Evan spent a good part of last Wednesday dissecting the whole interaction and deciding that it was just out of pity, that the smile Connor gave him was him trying not to laugh, that he just wanted to leave but Evan had to make it weird. So, Connor was being _nice_ , but not _that nice_. Because why would someone put up with Evan if not out of guilt? He doesn’t have friends, he has _family_ friends, _acquaintances_ , people that feel sorry for him.

 _*sorry, I didn’t mean to ignore you_  
_*I didn’t know if you just gave me your number because you felt like you had to_

_*yeah i gave u my number cause i think youre annoying_

_*what?_

_*sarcasm_  
_*guess i could dial that back too_

Alana clears her throat louder than necessary, shooting Evan a glare when he looks up at her from down the row. The people in between them are all hurriedly taking notes on what the teacher is saying and Evan is the only one not writing. She looks pointedly between him and his phone until he picks up his pen and follows suit. There’s hardly any point in writing it all down when she’s going to regurgitate it to him later anyway, but he’d rather not get caught texting if she’s going to call attention to it. When there’s a pause, he types back.

_*that's okay, I was just confused._

_*what's up_

The text comes in almost instantly on the heels of the last one. Evan’s brows knit together. Clearly, Connor’s skipping class, but what does that mean? What is Connor doing texting him?

_*English. You?_

_*cool. you should smoke with me_  
_*or like i know u probably don’t want to smoke_  
_*you don’t have to smoke._

 _Oh, so he’s high_. Evan’s phone keeps going off one message after another and he has to hold it a little tighter to keep the sound from being too obvious. Alana glances over one more time, vaguely condescending. She’ll call him out on it later, no doubt. 

_*but skip class_  
_*stand near me while i smoke_  
_*cmon_

Evan rolls his eyes. He’s not sure he really wants to talk to the manic, potentially violent Connor right now. It’s been a mediocre few days in terms of his usual lineup of hurdles-- regular things like getting and staying out of bed, walking into crowded hallways and cafeterias, fending off the general malaise that he trails behind him all day long. It’s the last week of October, so the days are getting shorter already, meaning it’s just that slight bit harder to get himself out of bed into the cold air and the dark. He’s been letting himself spend more time in bed than he probably should, both in the morning and after school, but that’s his own fault. He could stop, if his mom started noticing, if it were really a problem. The regular nerves are still there in the pit of his stomach, making him fidget and stutter and such, but it’s mostly just the nausea today. Still, he doesn’t feel particularly social. He’ll probably skip lunch and go to the computer lab instead. It’s a pretty decent day compared to the stress of the beginning of the year, but spending time with Connor? That could go any number of ways. 

Evan silences the notification and tunes back into the class for a moment. They’ve moved on from discussing the next novel as it gets closer to the end of the hour.

“...You should be locating your books for the project by now. You’ll have the next three weeks to read and analyze, and then your outline is due the third week of November…” Mr Greene is saying, “and then we’ll be in the computer lab for three days of research. You can’t start research until I approve your outline, so be here on that Friday. You don’t want to miss a research day.”

Mr. Greene goes on and on about the project, and as usual, Alana and the few other overachievers in the class eat it up. She scribbles notes down as he talks even though she’s certainly memorized them all by now and probably has identical copies in ten different places in her notebook. Everyone else slumps down into their seats, drops their pens, and tunes right out.

It’s the same spiel Mr. Greene gives at least once every week. The midterm is worth a hundred points. Half of it is based on the information in the presentation. Two external sources are required. The paper must be a minimum of four and a maximum of six pages, double spaced. Both books must be approved. Both sources must be approved. Your outline must be approved. This is an gifted level course, you are expected to perform at the best of your ability, so I want to see _effort. This is going to improve your writing and public speaking skills by leaps and bounds. This will prepare you for writing college-level research papers. Just wait until we get to the final..._

Evan can’t tune out hard enough. He doesn’t absorb much of the drilling but Mr. Greene’s needlessly loud voice still nestles itself into that familiar spot under his lower ribs that makes him somewhat glad he skipped breakfast this morning. Mr. Greene totters seriously down the aisle as he talks, making sure everyone is pretending to pay attention. Evan’s cast itches. He feels his heartbeat in the fingers poking out of the plaster and tries his very best not to fidget. His leg wants to bounce, his fingers want to knot into the hem of his shirt, but he keeps stubbornly still. No need to draw attention to himself. He feels a heavy sigh building, but lets it out slowly through his nose as Mr. Greene passes by. Having heard this speech so many times, one might think it would get easier to listen to, that he might start to accept the reality of that project, but it still makes him sweat and fidget every single time. If he hears it too much more, he thinks he might scream. Standing outside the school with an occasional maniac is starting to sound better. He could tolerate kicking something around.

People are packing up several minutes before the bell, making Mr. Greene cluck at them until the bell actually does ring. Alana makes a beeline for Evan, swimming her way against the current of people leaving class. 

“Who was messaging you like that _in class_? Was that Jared? He’s so bad about skipping. I don’t know how he passes,” she says in rapidfire.

“Oh yeah, it was-”

Evan’s phone goes off one more time, lighting up in his hand.

 _*I’m out back_

Alana raises an eyebrow at Evan as he makes some strange face. Before she can glance down, he locks his phone and pockets it.

“--yeah, it was Jared,” Evan mumbles.

Alana rolls her eyes and heaves a big sigh. “Did you miss anything? You can borrow the notes if you need them.”

“N-No, no thanks. That’s okay.” Evan scratches at the edge of his cast, hesitating. 

Alana peers at him curiously, narrowing her eyes from behind her glasses like there’s something written on Evan’s face that she’s missing. Evan quickly pulls his backpack onto his shoulders with a practiced set of one-armed motions and goes for the door, letting her follow. When they exit, Evan turns the opposite way than usual, making Alana give him another funny look.

“Uh-- Computer lab?” he says in explanation, already walking off.

Alana scoffs somewhere behind him. “Don’t get caught!”

Evan is already halfway down the hall when she says it, and he hunches under the looks a few people give them. He feels somewhat off balance as he rounds a few corners into a portion of the school he’s never had reason to be in-- the art wing, he thinks. He took creative writing, so he never had to walk further than the English rooms. The hallways are slightly wider and emptier, the sides bare of lockers, and it makes him feel twitchier than usual. The bell hasn’t rung, no one knows that he’s not where he’s supposed to be yet, but he rushes anyway. 

Evan’s not quite sure what “out back” means, but he assumes it’s where they were standing during the pep rally. So he goes for that stairwell that comes out right next to that alcove-- a rather narrow and disused one in the back of the art wing. If he didn’t feel sketchy about this before, he does now, tapping down the unfamiliar and somewhat dim plastic-covered stairs. He takes it down from the second floor, hesitating at the dead end when he reaches the bottom. What if he’s wrong about where Connor is? He didn’t say he’d go. Connor might have left. Why didn’t he text back? The door is going to squeak and someone will catch him. Connor called him out here as a joke. He should turn around, he should-

Evan pushes the door slowly out, letting in a rush of cool air. It squeaks just as terribly as he remembers from the pep rally, making him cringe at the almost inaudibly high pitched screech he creates. He eases it closed behind him in a failed attempt to make it quieter. 

No Connor. The only sound out here is the pine trees around the track rustling lazily in the wind. Evan scans around, but then the breeze brings him a faint whiff of weed and he looks over towards the far corner to see Connor cautiously poke his head around. He blinks, coming back into the shade, eyes subtly pink and sunken into dark circles in a now-familiar way. He grins when he sees Evan, and _yeah, he’s definitely in a wild mood,_ Evan thinks. The smell gets a heck of a lot worse as Connor steps closer and he’s still got a lit joint in one hand. It looks like he’s already gotten a good head start.

“Hey, you came.” Connor trudges over, kicking his messenger bag along the ground with him. He slumps into the wall nearby with a soft grunt and little more weight than he seems to intend. 

“Yeah.” Evan drops his backpack off his right arm and leans back against the wall too.

“Want a hit?”

“Oh no, not-- No thanks. I-I don’t smoke,” Evan shakes his head.

Connor shrugs. “Eh, seems polite to ask.” He takes one final puff and snuffs it out against the brick of the wall.

The bell rings faintly from inside the school and the distant sound of people in the hall fades into nothing, leaving them with the slow wind and the idle tapping of Connor’s boot against the pavement. Evan bristles, naturally, in the quiet, but tries to let it be this time. They don’t have to talk constantly. That’s normal. Not rude. Connor invited him out here. He’s allowed. No reason for his heart to start pounding. _It's normal_... He looks out at the piece of the field they can see past the faces of the building, trying to force the silence to sink into a comfortable mood rather than an awkward one.

It’s a pleasant day, all things considered-- not cold enough to be uncomfortable outside but also not warm enough to warrant taking off a jacket. The past few weeks have been pinballing annoyingly between warm and freezing, as fall tends to do, but the approach of November is starting to force things more persistently towards the side of freezing. This might be one of the last warm days of the year. It's still a little chilly because it's early in the day, but people will be shedding layers by lunchtime. The sun is slanting into the field with the softer glare of morning, having just finished burning the moisture out of the grass and the air. They stand in a dwindling strip of shade made by the sun rising from the front of the school, cooling the breeze that passes through the little aisle, tossing connor’s hair and calming some of Evan’s perpetual nerves. The cast shelters his left arm from the wind, leaving the edges damp and itchy. He misses feeling things with his left arm. The cast comes off next week and it can’t happen soon enough.

In the far corner of the field, a gym class spreads out to play soccer, appearing to them in brief flashes whenever the ball gets far enough out of bounds. The sight of people makes Evan a little nervous that someone will come marching over and bust the both of them, and Evan won’t be able to pull the “anxiety” card this time. In addition, he’ll get spotted with Connor, who you could smell the weed on from ten feet away. His mom would have a stroke if she had to get a phone call about Evan smoking. First he’s got an anxiety disorder and a broken arm and now he’s smoking drugs? The house would come down with all the fretting she’d do. And he’s not even smoking, he’s just standing next to Connor, who smokes like a damn factory. Imagine if she knew something really damaging. There’s a lot of ways that house could come down.

But no, it’s a pleasant day. The walls aren’t falling in on him. They’re outside. Evan closes his eyes for a beat, derailing that train of thought before it can get going any faster. He quietly takes a big breath, holds it for four counts, and lets it out as slowly as he can. 

Connor is watching him when Evan opens his eyes. 

“So are you like, always this stressed?” Connor asks, tipping his head in sluggish thought.

“What?” Evan blinks back at him.

“Seems like you’re on edge every single time I see you.”

“Not every time,” Evan mumbles, pressing a finger into the itching lip of his cast. He's well aware his life is just a balancing act. 

Connor scuffs his toe against the pavement some more. “You should try smoking. It might calm you down a little.” 

“I don’t think I should... But yeah, like I said that’s-- that’s me all the time.” 

“You could try... giving less of a fuck,” Connor suggests flatly. 

Evan laughs once, muttering, “yeah, wow, I never thought of that.”

“I mean, look at me. I’m relaxed.” Connor’s foot swings, drunkenly missing the concrete. 

Evan’s not sure if he’s allowed to laugh. Probably not. There’s a vague chance Connor might shove him into the sidewalk again. “I-It’s that easy, huh?”

“Ehh,” Connor says, shrugging with his whole upper body. “That’s a lie. I took my tranquilizer this morning. I couldn't give a fuck if I wanted to.”

“Oh… Should you really be mixing that with-uh-” Connor narrows his eyes and rolls his head to slowly look at Evan. Evan shrinks under it. “-u-uh, yeah, well you're already doing it I guess, so--”

Connor laughs, and it sounds a little bit off, like his voice comes out unsure what rhythm his laughs are supposed to be. It’s too choppy, too high in his throat, and it sends a small chill down Evan’s back. A somewhat warped smile remains on Connor’s face afterwards. He’s not quite as high as he was at the pep rally, but it’s close.

Another short beat of silence ensues, but it’s broken by Connor’s voice again, this time humming,-- not any tune that’s recognizable to Evan, just a few short little notes back in the lower part of his voice. He kicks his heel against the brick of the wall in time with whatever he’s humming. Evan takes a cautious glance over at Connor, who is still smiling to himself, and for some reason he feels an absurd instinct to flee tugging at him. He looks back off into the field instead and tries to ignore it, but almost doesn’t catch himself starting to pick at the hem of his shirt.

“You didn’t have to come with me, y’know,” Connor says levelly. Evan looks over at him again but doesn’t know what to make of it, Connor’s expression still trailing remnants of that weird smile.

“Oh no, I-I-I” Evan stops and starts, suddenly flustered. “I was going to skip anyway, I... I-It’s a nice day to-- um.” 

“Really?” Connor doesn’t sound convinced.

“Y-Yeah, really. I-”

“-It’s not like anyone forced you,” Connor continues rather sharply, “I didn’t think you’d show up.”

Connor’s mood has turned on a dime. Evan feels that flight instinct once more, making his palms break out into a sweat and the edge of his cast itch. He can’t tell if it’s because he’s threatened or because he can’t seem to get the conversation back under control. 

“Wh-Why would I-- not show up?” Evan tries his best to stop the stutter, but it’s already there full-force.

“You don’t have to pretend. I punch people. I throw textbooks at losers like you,” Connor says, gaining momentum. He turns to lean his right shoulder against the wall and watch Evan begin to fidget as he speaks. “Why’d you show up? Did you think I was gonna be mad if you didn't?”

“Wh- Of course not. I don’t-- Wh-Why would I think--?” Evan struggles to keep a full sentence going.

Connor leans his back flat against the wall again, taking his attention off Evan as the tail ends of that smile re-emerge and morph into something else, something distinctly not-amused that somehow fits much more readily onto his face. Evan resists the urge to stare, his heartbeat starting to race all over again.

At a moment’s notice, Connor’s voice goes from emotionless to harsh and ironic, layers of false cheer piling on as he goes. “You probably shouldn’t be around me if you’re that twitchy. You’ll end up with a broken nose or something…” His heel knocks into the wall again and again. “Everybody else gets it. Are you just, like, slow or something?”

 _Are you retarded? Use your words,_ Evan’s mind echoes. Connor’s voice is sharp enough to make Evan curl in on himself defensively, though it’s not quite angry, strangely empty of any real force. The words sound like the beginning of a meltdown, but Connor doesn’t raise his voice. Evan braces himself for Connor to fly off the handle, to start yelling or storm off, but instead he stands there and waits like the question isn’t rhetorical.

When he’s certain enough Connor isn’t planning to snap, Evan tries to answer. “I-I-I-- I don’t think that about you. Who would- uh--” He knows exactly who would. Scratch that, start over. “You’re not going to uh--. I’d have to like, make you mad or something, which I-- You’re-- Th-That’s silly, that’s-- I-I don’t think that.” Evan’s ramble goes a little off track, but Connor lets it fizzle out before he counters.

“I’m always mad,” Connor says, witheringly sarcastic. “Haven’t you heard? I’m gonna shoot up the school next week.”

The inflection makes it sound like a joke, but Connor isn’t laughing. It isn’t funny, really. Now that Evan’s been paying attention, he’s heard multiple groups of people harassing Connor with things like that in the past month. And that’s only what Evan’s been witness to in passing-- there’s no telling how much of that Connor deals with on a regular basis. If even Jared will contribute to it when there’s no one around to laugh with him, then Connor is a target for pretty much anyone who feels like being nasty. It makes Evan glad to be essentially invisible sometimes.

“I-I don’t think that about you. People just say that to be-- uh, well, because they’re-- douches.” Evan stumbles over the curse like a nervous middle schooler, but attempts to put some spite into it anyway. Connor huffs out a short laugh.

Connor kicks the ground, then the wall, then the ground, the sarcasm fading into just a low sour note in the air, but then he perks up once more.

He turns towards Evan again, fixing him with a flat, sidelong stare and a half unhinged smirk. “...You wanna see the gun?”

“ _What-?_ ” Evan startles.

That unsettling grin breaks even further open across Connor’s face. Evan feels sort of sick.

"It's not loaded. Don't worry," Connor promises, and to Evan’s utter alarm, actually starts to reach for his bag.

 _There’s no way he has a gun._ It’s a joke. A joke made in very poor taste. That doesn’t keep Evan’s heartbeat from kicking up in his chest. He shrinks back a half-step towards the door while Connor merrily digs into the bottom of his bag.

Finally, after a few moments of rifling through a mess of papers and miscellaneous school supplies, Connor puts his hand on the thing he was looking for. He looks up at Evan with a suddenly black expression, pausing for effect. Evan’s face must be just as horrified as Connor was hoping because Connor presses his lips together to stifle a laugh.

“-Ha!” Connor whisks his hand out of the bag towards Evan, and-- it's some kind of pocketknife, only the size of a highlighter.

Evan deflates in relief and Connor cackles at the way he’s recoiled, palms up to defend himself. Connor mimes slashing at the open air to the other side, making morbid sound effects to go with it. Evan’s alarm melts down into just worry in the pit of his stomach-- it’s not a gun, but it’s still sharp. Someone as prone to rage as Connor shouldn’t carry around a knife. Connor flips it around and it miraculously turns into a tiny pair of pliers, which he snips playfully at Evan before dropping them back into the chaos of his bag. He switches hands with the tool, throwing it closed as he does and re-zipping his bag with his right--

“Your _hand!_ -” Evan blurts.

Connor stalls halfway through throwing the zipper closed and yanks his hand back even though Evan hasn’t made a move towards him. It’s a useless effort, though. Evan already saw-- Connor’s right hand is absolutely covered in angry red gashes, the knuckles skinned down to peeling sores and the backs of his wrists flecked with slices.

“What?” Connor tries for casual, but he’s already cradling that right hand deeper in the sleeve of his hoodie. After an awkward beat, he lets it swing back down at his side and Evan gets a better glimpse of it. “Oh, that?”

“How did that-- Was that today?” Evan wonders out loud. It's not just the knuckles that are damaged this time, the injury trails all the way up into his sleeve to spots Evan can't see.

“I, uh-- I punched something,” Connor explains blandly, all the spite seeming to leave him at once, replacing itself with dull surprise. He worries his sleeve between his thumb and index finger. “I do that sometimes. Just, there was glass involved so--”

“That should be covered up. You could get an infection,” Evan rambles. 

Connor screws his mouth up and pulls his hand up into his sleeve, mumbling. “What the hell? I'm not gonna get infected.”

“Oh, I-” Evan scratches his cast futilely and makes himself look away. “Sorry, uh-- M-My mom's a nurse, I know about that stuff.” 

Connor looks off to the left for a moment too, away from Evan, still lightly gripping the end of his sleeve. “I do that like, once a week. It’s not that bad...” he trails off. He absently brings his other hand up to his mouth as if he’s about to start chewing on a nail, but then takes a look at the chipped pieces of black polish on his nails and wrinkles his nose, giving up on it. All the aggression from a few seconds ago is gone, leaving Connor somewhat deflated. Now that he’s been knocked off balance, he seems to cycle through a moment of thought, landing somewhere awkward and unsure. 

He doesn’t let things go quiet, instead asking the wall to his other side, “So, your mom’s a nurse?”

“Yeah, I guess it rubbed off on me-- the whole, uh, health-conscious thing...” Evan takes the cue to fill in the silence, letting random thoughts spill out haphazardly as they form. “I-It’s a good thing, too. I was a really clumsy kid-- well, I still am. I used to get hurt all the time, b-but not because I was roughhousing, I just fell a lot and stuff. Like, she knows how to tape up sprains and and stuff and check for concussions, which is good because like I said, y’know, I-I used to fall a lot.” Evan clears his throat, cutting that off, and adds another awkward attempt to keep up the conversation. “Uh, what’s your mom do?”

“She used to teach, I think…” Connor waves his hand dismissively. “I’m kind of her full-time job now-- y’know, keeping me out of trouble.”

“Oh,” is all Evan says. Heidi probably _thinks_ worrying about Evan is a full-time job. 

Evan has gone a little quiet so Connor keeps explaining. “It’s a good thing _my_ mom’s got a talent for flattery. I should’ve been expelled like, three times over.”

“Oh, well, uh-- th-that’s good,” Evan says, immediately grimacing. 

“Yeah, she’s best friends with the administration. Let’s see, I broke that kid’s nose, which technically counts as fighting even though he didn’t fight back.” Connor starts ticking items off on his fingers like he’s looking down a long list. “That was supposed to be my last strike. But I’ve had like, ten strikes. Before that, it was some asshole in the cafeteria, then I shoved somebody on the stairs…” 

Evan isn’t sure whether Connor expects him to look appalled or impressed, so he settles tensely somewhere between the two, still cautious not to somehow set Connor off again. 

Connor continues, looking skyward as he traces his way back. “...Oh yeah, I broke a keyboard. I broke… a lot of shit.” He laughs like it’s a fond memory, finishing his list. “And that’s just high school. They had to homeschool me for the last two weeks of school once because I threw a printer at somebody.” 

Evan remembers hearing about that one. It must have been right after moved here and changed schools, around the same time he met Jared. He wasn't in that class, but even back then, Connor was the talk of the school. Eight year old Jared was only too delighted to talk about how “flippin’ spooky” it was being in Connor’s class. 

“What about your--” Evan asks, gesturing down towards Connor’s hand. 

“Oh, that wasn’t at school. That was a flower vase last night,” Connor explains.

“Oh...” Again, Evan can’t think of much to say, so he pulls something out of nowhere. “I used to break things, like, because I was so clumsy… I uh- well, I broke my arm.” He raises his cast up like evidence, shrugging.

Connor chuckles, and this one is a bit more genuine, less stilted. “Yeah, but you didn’t do that stuff on purpose. I broke the vase on purpose-- or, well, mostly.”

“Yeah, um…” Evan searches for something else to say. “I broke a lamp once, because I was jumping on the bed.”

“Oh man, what a rebel.” Connor says, back to swinging his foot. “How old were you?”

“Uh, maybe eight? I fell, like, into the lamp and hurt myself. My mom had to tape the cut together because I was too upset to go get stitches.”

Evan vividly remembers having cried his eyes out while his mom tried her best to take care of a big slice on his arm that night. The cut wasn't even bleeding anymore, it was just so ugly to look at, gaping at the edges, and he'd never had stitches before. She felt so guilty forcing him into the car to get it stitched up that eventually, she’d given in and just taped it together with a bunch of little white strips that pulled the skin back together. He looks down at the joint of the cast, where the scar used to be. It's still somewhere buried under there, a little white line between his elbow and shoulder.

Connor gives a short laugh but doesn't offer anything up in response. He plays idly with the sleeves of his hoodie, taking the ends and pulling them up into the opposite sleeve so that his hands are trapped inside.

If Heidi could see Connor’s hand, Evan imagines she’d click her tongue at him in that irrevocably maternal way and drag him away to bandage it up, no questions asked. She’s got this sweet yet demanding way about her, such that no one ever really wants to deny her. When Evan was little, she always knew the the right cure for every kind of injury, the quickest way to get a kid to stop crying, and the first-aid kit was stocked with fun cartoon character bandages for every little scrape. Hand her a crying kid with a bloody knee and she’ll have it all taped up and right as rain in a few minutes. It’s all logic, to her. Clean it up, put a band-aid over it. Nothing to cry about.

But now she’s taking classes to become a paralegal. Now, she says she doesn’t like her job as much as she used to. She was always so good at what she did, Evan thought, gentle and kind and smart by nature, but maybe she finally got tired of taking care of everyone else. Maybe she wore herself out.

Yeah, she was always good at taking care of bumps and bruises and fevers, but hand her something she can’t touch, something that’s too deep to fix-- a husband who doesn’t want to try anymore, a son who breaks down for no good reason, and she’s lost. When Dad decides enough is enough, she’ll cycle through every possible way she could have fixed it and wind up neglecting to explain the gravity of it all to Evan until the truck shows up at their house. When, at fifteen, Evan finally admits he feels like he’s falling to pieces and he’s terrified he’ll never be any different, she’ll wear herself ragged searching for the right bandage to stick him back together. And she's so inherently kind, she tries so, so hard to keep everything together, that he will obediently take up each new solution she finds and pretend that he still fits.

The both of them have been at this for so long that he feels like he’s become just a poor imitation of himself, a pixelated mosaic of what bits of the original are still left. By now, he thinks he’s mostly just xanax, and walks through the park, and _this is gonna be your year_ , and the homey inside of his therapist’s office. He’s trying, but that’s all he is-- just the illusion of something real with no end goal. He’s... an empty lot surrounded by stilts, made to hold up a building that’s already fallen-- or maybe he’s the stilts and the building is everything else and all he knows how to do is hang on and bend in the storm. The house is shuddering in the wind, and he is both the stilts and the hurricane--

\--no, today is a pleasant day. The trees are drifting in a light, cool wind. Connor is looking at him. _Pack it away_. 

Evan’s thoughts have been trickling back in that direction too often today, probably because he has therapy later. This tends to happen every Wednesday. It’s nothing new, nothing he can’t handle. He takes a breath and pulls out his phone, ignoring the way Connor noticeably tries not to stare.

It looks like Evan’s gotten a few texts since he turned his ringtone off. Apparently, Jared texted him ten minutes ago. 

_*man whyd you rat me out to alana. she's calling me a bad influence_  
_*since when are you an honors kid_  
_*tell me you're coming to lunch_

Leave it to Jared to accidentally help Evan lie. He might have to own up to that later.

Now that Evan sees the time, it’s getting close to the end of the period. Connor has picked up his bag and has the shoulder strap over his neck as he ticks away on his phone too. Another little breeze blows past them and Evan frowns, sniffing at the shoulder of his shirt. He made the mistake of standing slightly downwind. 

“Am I gonna smell like weed?” Evan wonders. “I can't-- My mom can't think I was smoking.” It wouldn’t be a great idea to smell like weed for therapy either.

Connor squints at him, shaking his head. ”Nah, you’re fine.”

Evan bites into his top lip, considering whether there’s a way he could make sure. He could ask Jared at lunch, but then he’ll have to explain. God forbid Alana catches him asking that.

“Seriously, no one is ever gonna believe you’re smoking,” Connor tells him.

“I could smoke,” Evan counters, “I, uh… I jump on beds and break stuff.”

”Oh yeah, for sure.” Connor nods faux-seriously.

“I just don’t want to freak my mom out.” Honestly, though, his mom would probably jump for joy if he told her he was making a new friend, weed be damned.

Connor shrugs his bag around under his arm and peels himself away from the wall. “If she knew you were hanging out with me, she'd probably have an aneurysm.”

“Oh no, she doesn’t judge.” Evan pockets his phone and starts to drift towards the door behind Connor.

“Everybody judges,” Connor huffs. He wrenches the door open, the hinges letting out a long squeal as he hands the door off to Evan. 

The sound echoes around in the little stairwell as Evan sets it closed behind them. When they’re both done cringing, Connor gives a wave and steps away towards the top stairs.

"See you?" Evan says.

"Yeah. Text me." Connor walks backwards up one step, blanking out for a second while Evan stares. He tugs at the base of the hair by his ear and spins, leaving up the stairs as the bell rings for next class. 

At lunch, Alana predictably goes on about their next book, giving Evan a rundown of everything he missed with frequent tangents to fill in her thoughts. And of course, she tells the same old story about the midterm project. Luckily, she's too distracted to care when Jared tries to tattle on Evan for lying. He still gets a whack in the shoulder for it-- Jared's preferred means of communicating pretty much any feeling with Evan. He could hold a whole conversation using just various forces of shoulder taps, probably. 

Evan sniffs around trying to tell if he smells like weed, but he mustn't because when he gets in the car with his mom, she doesn't mention anything. Therapy goes smoother than usual. He tells Dr. Sherman that he's been trying to put himself out there and make a friend, and he thinks it's actually working. Connor is a little... eccentric, to say the least, occasionally kind of taxing to hang out with, but Evan thinks it's worth it, for the chance to see Connor tense up awkwardly just asking Evan to text him. The "Sincerely, me" letter Evan shows Dr. Sherman is mostly positive, and apparently convincing because she smiles when she reads it. He's gotten better at making them sound realistic. When he gets home, he takes a good whiff of his shirt and ends up tossing it in the hamper even though it's hardly noticeable. Over pizza, Heidi reads Evan's drafts of two of the scholarship essays, and they decide they're ready to send in. For a day that started out with fending off an anxiety attack, it's not bad.

Later, he finally creates a contact in his phone for Connor and nervously types out a couple thumbs up emojis. Connor responds a couple minutes later with a jack-o-lantern.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey hi sorry for the gap in updates if you're following this, I am just completely incapable of writing in a straight line. I'm still not satisfied with how clunky this chapter turned out and I've been busy writing endgame chapters bc I have zero self control.  
> anyway, thanks for reading!! <3
> 
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)
> 
> (also sorry if anyone got multiple emails about the update I don't know what I'm doing)


	8. • • •

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Con's POV so be aware of cursing

Connor finally opens his eyes and leaves them open, after what must have been an hour of stubbornly pulling the blanket up to his forehead. The blackout curtains he has over the windows are doing their job, but the clatter of cutlery and the smell of breakfast cooking downstairs waft right up the stairs into his doorless room. Cynthia has been bustling around downstairs cooking and doing god knows what else for a good while now, possibly the whole time it’s been light outside. It’s not even seven o’clock and she’s already had her coffee for the morning, which means she’s been _planning_ , if Connor knows anything about how she tends to cope. Family breakfast is one of the things she only ever does when she’s stressed out and looking for something to pour her energy into-- or, worse, when she’s come up with some new solution to pitch at them. Connor rolls onto his stomach and mashes his face into the pillow. It’s too early for this shit. It’s always too early for Cynthia’s family events, even if she starts them at three PM on a weekend. 

A short while later-- not nearly long enough-- Larry makes his way downstairs and Cynthia greets him with a cheery voice and a plate of food. That sets the ball rolling on the whole morning.

“Kids! Breakfast!” Cynthia calls up the stairs. Connor flinches at the noise, grumbling into the pillow.

Zoe starts to shuffle around next door and Connor waits until she’s downstairs and their father stars prodding at him to fully surrender to being awake. His eyes won’t focus properly after being squashed against the bed, and the dark inside of his room is all dull, gray static to him, the rectangle of light coming in from the hallway almost blinding. Somehow, despite the heaviness of a severe lack of sleep, that familiar static buzz starts to steal its way into his head, pulling his shoulders tight and making his head swim. He’d _kill_ to be able to skip school today-- or even better, to stay in bed and skip the whole day. Hell, he’d rather just go back to sleep and wait to wake up to a better morning, a morning where his first thought after forcing himself out of bed isn’t wondering how long it’s going to be until he snaps. 

But of course, he can’t just go back to bed. There’s not a better morning waiting for him tomorrow, and he’s not allowed to skip school anymore. Larry won’t let Cynthia write him any more notes. He’s “on his last strike” for the hundredth time, which means this is happening whether he likes it or not. 

In between cracking the blinds open and shrugging into a clean shirt, he finds a single white capsule on his bedside table, sitting on a piece of paper towel in the only clear spot. He considers pocketing it for a second, but then takes a random bottle and begrudgingly gulps it down.

Cynthia and Zoe stand around the kitchen table making small talk about how cold it’s supposed to get this week and how thanksgiving in coming up. Larry joins in, griping about how many of his coworkers are out sick as flu season starts up. Without Connor, the three of them sound practically normal. One could almost forget that last night, they’d been throwing abusive words across the living room well past the time they all should have been asleep. Connor can’t remember exactly where it had all started, except that Cynthia had set him off, and she got the brunt of his anger. It’s safe to assume that Cynthia is missing the most sleep of all of them. Connor had laid in bed for hours last night, too strung out to drift off, but Cynthia hadn’t even snuck in to bed until it was past midnight. And here she is awake and productive long before the rest of them. It's possible she hasn't even slept.

When Connor finally emerges from his room and thumps downstairs, he's almost afraid to look. Cynthia is standing over the stove, scraping some hash browns out of a pan, and when she turns it’s all painfully obvious to him. She’s so upbeat that it borders on annoying, running on that special kind of caffeinated morning person energy that makes everyone else in the vicinity feel tired. A sunny smile plasters itself onto her face when she sees him, like letters lighting up on a neon sign. 

Connor’s skepticism must be obvious because she goes from stilted to robotic. It’s like pulling a ripcord to make her spit out a programmed Morning Person line. “Good morning!” she parrots, “I hope you’re hungry!”

She serves him a big helping of breakfast and _pats him on the shoulder_ a couple times, which is less comforting than it is utterly alarming, because she stopped trying to do things like that a long time ago. Normally, he shrugs out of the way or brushes it off, but he’s too tired to anticipate it today. He grunts in response and plops down at the table, where Zoe and Larry are busy staring at their phones. When Cynthia joins them, the phones don't disappear, but they each not-so-discreetly shift them under the table instead of next to their plates.

”Oh go ahead, text at the table. What do I care?” Cynthia rolls her eyes and waves them on with a good-natured smile.

They pocket their phones anyway, surrendering more easily than ever to Cynthia’s _no cell phones at meals_ rule. The small talk resumes while Connor works slowly on his potatoes-- the cold, flu season, midterms… Connor isn’t listening when Cynthia makes a careful attempt to pull him into it. He tries to zone out, let himself believe that pill is already helping him put up a barrier between them and him, but instead his own silence grates on his ears, making his face go deliberately blank and his hands twitch with frustration. He takes another bite, chews, and looks away. They each choose an inanimate object to look at and stop trying to include him. 

_Connor’s a lost cause. Just let him go._ That’s what they’re thinking. He knows it. Connor doesn’t know why they want to do this song and dance every time. All they’re doing is ignoring what’s in front of them, tiptoeing around everything, around _Connor_ , because they all know calm and unproblematic is a fragile state of being for him. He is a problem. That’s what he does best. 

Oh, but they’re having a normal meal for once, despite him. What a miracle, right? _Bullshit._

Connor picks up the ketchup that’s been placed next to his spot at the table, specifically because Cynthia knows he’s the one who likes it, and squeezes out a pile of it into the middle of his eggs. Cynthia smiles to herself, but doesn't comment. Connor wants to punch something. He knows he shouldn’t blame them for latching onto the break in routine. They all take whatever moments of peace they can get. But he’s so fed up with his mom after all this that he can’t bring himself to join in anymore.

The fact is, Cynthia is a master at denial. Given the circumstances, one might expect to hear that about Larry first, the one who continues to ignore that Connor has been bounced around between eight different therapists in the past several years, making his way down a list of various tranquilizers and mood stabilizers as he went. Because clearly he doesn't _need_ all that, he just likes being the problem child. He scares his therapists away on purpose. That’s why it never works. Larry is in denial in that he is excellent at convincing himself that he is the only one without blame. That makes sense. That's obvious.

But it's Cynthia who really invests energy into her act. She cleans up the aftermath whenever there’s a meltdown or an argument and then keeps it up by going to book clubs and spin classes and yoga lessons with the parents of Zoe’s friends. They're probably hardly aware that Zoe has a brother, just like they're none the wiser about the fact that the new things Cynthia shows off are there because their predecessors are broken. In fact, after the flower vase incident of a week ago, there is no longer any breakable glass or ceramic left out in their living room or kitchen-- no picture frames or remotely expensive items within easy reach of throwing or punching. Connor glances up to notice that the items on a few kitchen shelves have been shifted around, glassware and mugs moved towards the top where Cynthia herself can't reach them. She probably stood on a chair to do that. The bottom shelves are empty save for a fucking Live Laugh Love sign that she migrated there to fill it in. The house is getting sparser and cleaner by the day under Cynthia’s influence. She is deleting it all for him, padding the room with blander decorations and packing the rest into the closet along with all the meltdowns and the hurtful words.

Cynthia’s _cleaning_ is a process that they’re all familiar with by now. She scrubs at the things she doesn't like until she finds a way to paint something better over them and make them look deliberate. And when something is really wrong, she dials that up to eleven. She cooks breakfast and drags them on family outings and sits them down for interventions like it’s all a new idea. Every time she gets disappointed, she slaps on a new layer of paint and pretends it’s a blank canvas, like today's the day it all turns around. This is the morning she's been waiting for, so forget everything else. Forget the old pills, _these ones_ are going to work. And when it’s not pills, it’s some gluten-free, chakra-healing crap. _Bull. Shit._

Cynthia spears her fork through eggs, then potatoes, then eggs, not raising the bite to her mouth, then speaks to Zoe, turned towards her but still looking at the plate. “Zo', would you mind driving your brother to school today?”

There’s a small pause as that breaks up the flow of conversation. Larry swipes at his phone between them, unsurprised.

“It’s Thursday. I have jazz band,” Zoe says stiffly. 

“That’s fine.” Cynthia works on scraping half the food back off of her fork.

“He’ll have to wait for like, forever. Can’t you just let him drive?”

“I’ll drive myself. It’s fine.” Connor uses his voice for the first time to protest. 

Cynthia does her best not to react. She doesn’t look up from that forkful of food that she’s been messing with for about a full minute now. “Just let-”

“-We decided to take your keys back.” Larry butts in, dropping his cell phone flat on the table. 

“ _Larry_ ,” Cynthia warns.

Zoe deflates visibly at the sharp turn, pushing her mostly empty plate another inch away. She goes to open her mouth again, but Connor jumps in first. 

“It’s _fine_. Just-” Connor drops his fork onto his plate with a loud clink. Larry gives him a cautioning look and Connor resists the urge to raise his voice, instead talking in a quick stream. “Take them after school. I’ll go straight home, okay? Jesus.”

“We aren’t asking,” Larry says, then amends a little more gently, “Zoe, please take your brother to school.”

Zoe huffs quietly, but surrenders. She knows better than to push it. 

There’s a beat of strained silence while they all wait to see if Connor is going to blow up. He doesn’t want to blow up. He could-- he always could-- but he hasn’t lost control just yet. _Hey, miracles are happening right and left this morning._ He takes a final large bite of his food and they loosen just a little.

“Does that mean I’m grounded too?” Connor says snidely, mouth full. It’s not even a question anymore. By Larry’s standards, he’s been grounded since he was ten.

“I’ve got to get going.” Larry ignores him, standing up from the table. 

With a bit of shuffling and short peck on the cheek from Cynthia, he’s gone, out the door in seconds. Zoe puts her plate in the sink. Cynthia leaves hers half-eaten at the table, but takes Connor’s away when he stands up. Connor shoulders his bag and takes out his phone while Zoe goes upstairs to fetch hers.

”Connor,” Cynthia starts.

Connor mutters in vague acknowledgement, reading through his texts. It looks like he’s missed a few.

 _Huh, Evan got his cast off yesterday. Wonder if his arm looks funny._ Maybe Connor can convince him to skip lunch today. Anything to help make up for a shitty sober morning. Although at this rate, it might be better if Connor used lunch to take a nap instead, even if he can’t smoke. He’s still got some weed hidden away in a disused dress shoe in his closet, but he sort of learned his lesson about getting too high on days he takes his new tranquilizer-- not fun. He’d much rather be high than feel dulled out on his meds, honestly, but he’s starting to run out of weed… 

”Con’,” Cynthia tries again, louder.

At that, Connor turns back to find Cynthia leaning one hand against the kitchen island, the other closed into a loose fist in midair. Her mouth is hanging open just a touch, like she’s got something to say, but she isn’t looking directly at him. Instead, she’s staring off somewhere in front of him nearby her half-eaten food on the table with this haunted look on her face that makes Connor feel vaguely ill all of a sudden. Watching her hesitate, he slowly realizes that she hasn’t actually made eye contact with him once all morning-- not that that’s unusual on his end, but usually she at least tries. There’s something else going on. Whatever it is, it’s bad enough that it’s got her struggling to talk and looking at him like she’s _afraid_ of him or something. But it’s not in that familiar “ _please don’t blow up_ ” way, more of an “ _I’m sorry_ ” type of way and all Connor can think is that she knows. She _knows. How?_

”Mom?” Zoe stands at the bottom of the stairs, stalled into confusion just like Connor.

That’s enough to snap Cynthia out of it. She jumps up like someone’s just yanked on her puppet strings and starts chattering. ”Oh, don’t forget your lunches. Did you find that jacket you were looking for?” she asks Zoe.

Zoe raises her eyebrows a little but follows Connor towards the door. “I think it was down here…” she says, glancing towards the newly spotless living room. “ It’s fine.”

“Oh, well have a good day. And text if you're gonna be late, okay?”

”Yeah, Mom.”

Connor is out the door into the garage before Cynthia can stop him. _She’s done with it. It’s all over._ He leans a hand against the roof of Zoe’s car, breathing mechanically.

”What was that about?” Zoe asks, unlocking the car.

Connor jumps when the car flashes. Zoe gives him a confused look.

“Nothing,” he mutters, dropping into the passenger seat. Zoe sighs through her nose and looks at him out of the corner of her eye as she starts the car.

“Don’t fucking look at _me. I_ don’t know,” Connor blurts.

Zoe tenses at his rise in volume, but starts backing out of the driveway like she’s not bothered. Connor lets out his own short sigh. It’s going to be one of those days, which is to say that the next person who so much as bumps him in the hall is likely to get screamed at. Maybe he should opt to sleep through lunch after all.

“You’re pleasant today,” Zoe quips.

Connor raises his thumb to his mouth and shoves the nail in between the gap in his front teeth-- doesn't bite, just pushes his teeth apart and mumbles through his hand.

“Yeah, aren’t we all?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short chapter bc school is back now and I took another break to get settled in. looking to maybe update Saturdays. thanks for reading! 
> 
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


	9. • • •

“C’mon, lemme see. Is is weird?” Jared wheedles.

“It’s not weird,” Evan says for the tenth time.

“Is it like, all shriveled and pruney?”

“Pruney…?” Evan lifts an eyebrow. “No, it doesn't work like that. It’s just-- kind of pale.”

“Huh…” Jared pauses to spin the dial on his locker. “Bet you’re happy. What was it like living with the school psycho's name on your arm for a whole month?” 

Evan lets his shoulders slump visibly, but Jared continues, smiling to himself as he exchanges books in and out of his locker.

“Aw, did you keep it? You could probably sell it one day. Y’know, when he gets famous for carving people up or something,” 

Evan doesn’t dignify that with a response. Jared knows full well how much it bothers Evan when he says things like that, but it seems like a pathological thing in him. He just wants to get a rise out of people. Having participated in their little lunch group for a while now, Evan and Alana have slowly learned that the best way to deal with things like this is to simply not reward the behavior with anything. Jared’s sort of like a bad dog-- the kind that chews up the sofa if you leave him alone but will still sit up and roll over for attention. He at least has the grace to look a little embarrassed when Evan shuts him out.

Jared drops that and changes the subject. “So, what’s it like?” He gestures towards Evan’s arm.

Evan shrugs. Today is the first time all semester he’s been able to comfortably wear a long sleeved jacket, since nothing would fit over the cast. Everything’s easier without a giant piece of plaster weighing his left half down, but it’s the little things you miss the most, Evan guesses. He thought it’d be nice to let his skin breathe, but it just came out all scaly and hypersensitive. Even the soft inside of his hoodie sleeve almost feels like it’s scraping him. Getting the cast off was supposed to stop the itching, but now that he can scratch, it’s all he wants to do. The doctor said it would go away in a few days, but it’s just a different kind of annoying as of now.

“It’s just itchy. And the skin's all hypersensitive,” Evan explains, rolling his sleeve up to expose the awkward the tan line. “Like, taking showers hurts.”

“Weird.” Jared goes to poke at it, but Evan rolls his eyes and tugs his sleeve back down.

Jared shoves a book from his bag into his locker, crunching on top of a few papers at the bottom, and what looks like an old bagged lunch. He slings his backpack around to the front on one arm and rifles through it, then through the mess in his locker, scowling.

“Shit, I think I left Trig at home.”

“You’re in Trigonometry?” Evan wonders. Evan took Trigonometry last year, and Jared was always better than him at math.

“What? No.” 

A notebook comes tumbling out of the top of Jared’s locker, but he catches it and shoves it back in a few times until it stays. 

“I’m in Calc B. I’m just doing Trig for this asshole so he’ll write my English paper.” Jared thumps the locker beside his. “Fuck, I forgot. I wonder if I can steal one from the room...”

“You’re in _AP Calculus_?”

Jared laughs once. “Jeez, don’t look so shocked.”

Evan never even considered Jared being good at school. He knew Jared did well with computers and math, but he’s doing other people’s math homework? And he calls _Evan_ a nerd?

“Okay, I’m about to be insulted,” Jared pouts.

“S-Sorry, just-- It’s not that I didn’t think you were, uh-- i-it’s just, math is hard.”

Jared rolls his eyes. “C’mon, we’re gonna go sneak a textbook before the bell rings.”

He doesn’t give Evan a chance to protest before he starts walking, dragging Evan along without really trying. Dealing with hallways during class switches has never been easy for Evan, and sometimes when he goes it alone, either he gets stuck or he’s late to his next class. So he sticks as close to Jared as he’ll allow him to, using him to swim through the crowd. Jared always walks too fast, but he looks back and waits for Evan at acceptable intervals, even tugs him forward by the sleeve a couple times when Evan’’s afraid to brush too close to somebody. It’s a little pathetic, but it works. They’re used to this.

They reach a bit of a bottleneck in the flow of people next to the staircase and Jared actually grabs onto Evan and pulls him along as he pushes their way through. There’s some uncomfortable brushing and bumping, but it's better than Evan’s usual method of going out of his way to avoid it. Once they’re out the other side, Jared’s quick to let go, but then there’s a huge, reverberating boom as someone slams a locker behind them. Evan jumps right out of his skin, bumping hard into Jared’s back. He scrambles to apologize and back away, which pushes him into the gap in the crowd as people all squish themselves towards the opposite side of the hall. 

Jared tugs Evan back out of the clearing by the loop of his backpack, keeping him from slipping into the bubble of attention, and that’s when Evan turns and notices Connor at the center of the commotion, sharp and coiled tight. He’s scowling at the blank wall of his closed locker, fist pressed against the door, oblivious that one of the people staring at him is now Evan. Evan flexes his fingers around his backpack straps and takes a step backwards. He shouldn’t just stare. He needs to move, let Jared pull him someplace else before Connor sees him there and assumes the worst.

Instead, Jared chooses that moment to start misbehaving, leaning over towards Evan but still talking at normal volume. “What’d I tell you, man?”

Evan stops cold, but Jared continues undeterred. 

“Seriously, you could probably get on a talk show in ten years. Like, _‘I was best friends with the Ellison High Shooter.’_ ’”

“ _Jared._ ”

It takes a second for Evan to realize that he’s just yelled. He’s pulled himself out of Jared’s reach and now Jared is slowly retracting the hand he’d been pulling Evan along with, staring at him like he has three heads. All the people who have slowed down to watch are shifting their attention on to Evan now too and _that’s not good, that’s the opposite of good. Time to go. Come on, Jared, start pulling. Mush. Something._

Evan draws his arms up in front up him and spins nervously to face Connor. Connor is completely motionless, the same as he was before, face unreadable with that deep-set scowl and body drawn into a hard line. He’s all sharp edges, pulled tight and ready to catch on anything that touches him. Evan already knows better than to get too close at times like these, and this is too close. What he really wants to do is pull Connor out of this awful hallway and apologize, but it wouldn’t do any good right now. It would just make people stare. Connor would end up mad at _Evan_ , probably.

Jared looks between the two of them, trying to parse out what’s going on, but coming up blank. Evan squirms under all the attention and hurries through a couple useless syllables trying to get it to stop.

“I-I, uh- I-I-I-- J-J--” Evan splutters, but then he sees Jared come to some kind of conclusion and start to smirk at him in that awful patronizing way- “Just shut _up_.”

Jared takes a shocked half-step back at that, looking positively stricken-- and that’s kind of satisfying, honestly. It’s possible Jared is actually paying attention to Evan for once, and that’s verifying even if it also makes Evan want to crawl out of his skin right now. 

Connor shifts out of the pose he’s been stuck in to throw a glance Evan’s way, still scowling, still ready to snap-- maybe at Evan, maybe at Jared, maybe just in general. Evan’s mouth opens to say something, but he can’t move any air to speak. 

“What the hell?” Jared says finally.

Connor is gone when Evan turns back, off down the hall and into the crowd in less than a second.

“Damn, dude. I didn’t know you could be that loud.” Jared smiles as if that’s praise. “If it really bothered you that much, you could’ve said something.” 

_I did_ , Evan thinks sourly. Alana read Jared the riot act for it just a couple days ago at lunch, but apparently nothing sank in. 

Instead of voicing that, Evan stutters some more and apologizes a few times in quick succession. “--S-Sorry, I just-- I-I didn’t mean to yell-”

“No, dude, I’ll quit, okay?” Jared’s hand comes down on Evan’s shoulder as he faces him, diverting his attention away from the rest of the hallway. He fixes his glasses with the other hand, giving Evan a light jostle. “I won’t do that around you anymore. Calm down.”

 _Not the point._ Evan takes a steadying breath anyway, finding that he was starting to hyperventilate. He closes a hand around his phone in his jacket pocket, wondering how long he should wait before trying to text Connor. It might be best to leave this alone, actually. 

Once Evan’s a bit less stiff, Jared goes back to pushing him along, trailing Evan more gingerly at the side instead of behind.

“You’re coming to lunch today,” Jared tells him with a friendly shoulder whack.

“Okay.” Evan flinches a little even though it’s not that harsh, and Jared pulls his hand away.

“I need Alana’s help with my Chem homework and if you’re not there it’ll just be the two of us, and that’s weird.” 

“R-Right, yeah.”

They make their way to a math room, where Evan reads out problems so Jared can jot them down, planning to actually do them during first period. Jared carts Evan back towards his own first class as compensation, casually telling him about how he should get mad more often, because maybe people would listen if he weren’t so quiet all the time. 

“Hey, take a page from Connor, why don’t you?” Jared jokes, starting to turn back towards his own homeroom.

Evan pointedly ignores that comment too, but waves goodbye. He waits until third period before he decides it’s safe to text Connor. Connor doesn't respond.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no, Jared. bad. don't chew the sofa. you leave Connor alone.  
> (don't worry, I don't hate Jared. he's cool, he's just terribly misguided and essentially annoying)  
> also I debated whether to leave "come on Jared, MUSH" in there but fuck it this is fanfiction I'm allowed to be terrible 
> 
> thanks for reading, freaks!!  
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


	10. • • •

There’s someone staring at Connor. A pair of eyes have been boring into the back of his head for the past several minutes, the source somewhere down the hall to his right-- or maybe he already saw her in his peripheral vision, because this isn’t really a mystery anymore. There’s this mousy, sandy blonde haired chick who stands at the corner of the hallway and stares on mornings that Connor uses his locker. Sometimes there are two other girls next to her, the three of them unremarkable as a whole and each of them ungainly in some way on their own-- one's chubby, another speaks broken English, and the blonde one is tiny enough to be a sixth grader. He thinks he heard them call the blonde Sarah once, not that it matters. 

For the few short minutes he’s in range, they steal looks at him and murmur to each other over their phones, occasionally laughing or whispering just out of his earshot. It took a good while at the beginning of the year for Connor to realize that they’re not actually trying to antagonize him, they’re just waiting for him to leave. 

The problem is, Maybe Sarah’s locker is right next to Connor’s. He knows this because one day back in September, he’d walked up to his locker to find her already there picking through hers, those two friends at either side of her chatting away. When he’d shown up, the short, stocky one tapped Maybe Sarah on the shoulder, and then they’d all gone quiet and shifted awkwardly to one side. Their conversation shriveled right up as he dug into his locker, pissed off and jerky as per norm. He’d slammed the door hard as he left, just to give them something to be really scared of, and that was the end of that. Now she waits for him to finish using his locker first.

Today, she’s alone, and she’s pretending to text, standing a bit farther off and looking more uncertain than usual. She’s locking and unlocking her phone over and over again, looking up towards him in short intervals through the stream of people crossing the hall. Connor only understands why she’s acting strange when someone at a locker to his left darts a concerned glance his way and he realizes he’s transferred the same book from his locker to his bag and back, forgetting mid-action where he was going with it. And now he’s hovering there with it in his hand again, completely lost. How long has he been standing here? 

So it’s not just Maybe Sarah staring this time, it's everybody else too. He’s just been too distracted to notice. He can’t focus long enough to get through his locker because that awful tranquilizer he’s supposed to take is diluting all his thoughts, translating them into nothing but a dull buzz. But hey, it’s effective, right? It’s hard to get mad when you can’t think straight. Connor’s not mad. He’s not anything. Maybe he’s not really here and this is some kind of uninspired replay dream. What does he need this book for again? Who the fuck cares? 

Maybe Sarah finally gathers her tiny self up and makes a go for her locker. To her credit, she doesn’t appear that nervous, even though what’s happening is awfully obvious. She pulls books out of her locker and shoves her bag inside at a controlled speed, rushing but not blatantly so. Connor can’t seem to shake himself loose from the position he’s settled into. Blinking blearily into his mostly-empty locker while she rummages is all he can manage. 

_Either put the book back or don’t. You look like a lunatic. Put it back. Leave._

_You_ are _a lunatic. Take it. Go._

Maybe Sarah looks over in his direction only once, but that’s enough. Connor slams his locker door with all his force, making Maybe Sarah yelp and jump backwards, leaving her locker hanging ajar. People scatter away from Connor in a swarm, creating an empty bubble of space around him. It’s the intended result of slamming the locker, probably, but it doesn’t do much to ease the awful static noise in his head. He doesn’t need to do it. He’s not angry-- or maybe he is, he can’t really tell anymore. If he is, it’s a watered down, distant sort of anger, like anger for the sake of principle rather than for real rage.

There are a lot more eyes on him now, people murmuring, watching and waiting to see if he’ll explode. He’s not going to, not yet, but the stares crawl over his skin, make the hair on the back of his neck stand up. 

And then there’s a murmur that’s just loud enough for him to hear-- that he’s meant to hear, based on the nasty tone.

“What’d I tell you, man?”

Jared Kleinman. The idiot has some kind of supernatural penchant for showing up on Connor’s worst and weirdest days and pushing them even further towards awful.

“Seriously, you could probably get on a talk show in ten years. Like, _‘I was best friends with the Ellison High Shooter,’_ ” Jared mocks.

The words sail right past Connor’s head and splash into the onlooking crowd, a couple heads turning, a couple more stopping to raise eyebrows and glare. 

Connor’s not even angry. He can’t be, because he’s not sure he's really here. People are staring, Jared’s mocking him, but none of it really matters. He’s here, but he’s not himself-- Connor didn’t hear that. Kleinman’s just talking about him behind his back, just being an ass. Nothing new, just a replay. Connor doesn’t care. He _doesn’t-_

“ _Jared_.”

Just like that, all the slipping, clanking gears in Connor’s head screech to a halt for one long, blank second. 

“-just shut _up,_ ” Evan finally forces out.

Connor feels an uncomfortable little twinge of something anger-adjacent-- not exactly anger, but close enough. The burden of staring eyes shifts off of Connor onto Evan, who shrinks instantly under it, stammering out apology after pathetic apology. 

Mechanically, Connor moves, twitching upright with an uncomfortable stale exhale, like his muscles have caught in this position for hours instead of just seconds. Evan steps backwards towards Jared and turns to gape at Connor like a fish out of water, mouth opening and closing on empty syllables. 

“What the hell?” Jared chimes back in, and when Evan turns away that’s Connor’s cue to bolt.

Connor is gone when Evan turns back, off down the hall and into the crowd in less than a second. He comes barreling down the nearest set of stairs and spilling into the hallway two levels below, on autopilot towards homeroom. The halls blur into a backdrop of muddled voices and speckled tile floors as he marches his way towards class. He just needs to get marked present for the day, and then he’ll be gone. If he’s lucky, he won’t wake up with a detention slip and the teacher won’t have a damn thing to say about him sleeping through class.

Within a few minutes, however, it becomes clear he won’t actually be able to doze off at his desk. The class goes on in the background, a lecture instead of an assignment, the dull talking still somehow dragged to the front of his mind. He can’t ignore it well enough to fall asleep, but he also can’t get his mind to wander. Despite his best effort, he still gets bits and pieces of the lecture, and he twitches hard when someone bumps him as they pass behind his seat. They don't apologize, even though they've jostled him quite a bit-- maybe on purpose.

The impulse to sit up and snap at this person flickers dimly, tensing his shoulders into a line, but Connor squashes it back down. It's not worth it. It rarely is, to snap at someone in public, but it's not like it's always his choice. It's a trade-off, whether it's worth more to bully the impulse back down or to force his anger into whatever or whoever happens to be closest. He almost wishes someone would push him, just so it would finally overflow into some useful reaction, but that's not usually the way things work.

Really, people aren’t all that stupid. They know Connor’s a ticking time bomb at any given moment, and they know not to antagonize him. However, that doesn’t mean they stop altogether, they just make it into a collection of smaller crimes-- stuff that you can't exactly get angry over without looking like a psycho. People will walk past and bump him on purpose or casually knock things off his table just to see if they get a reaction. Or, some of them will do what Jared does and talk about Connor like he isn’t there. It's like they're playing chicken, seeing how bold they can get with it before Connor breaks someone's nose. And it's not usually the main offender that gets the broken nose, it's someone who just happens to push him over the edge. Whoever happens to be within range when the last domino falls takes the brunt of it, whether that’s his family, a nearby object, or some kid at school who looks at him funny. 

One would think that his violent streak would discourage people, but not so. Most of them have learned not to antagonize Connor verbally, at least not unless it’s from a safe distance. Jared Kleinman is an arrogant exception to that rule, but it’s only a matter of time before he chooses the wrong time and gets what’s coming to him. It was a near thing that he didn’t end up with a bloody nose today. Really, only Evan’s appearance stopped that from happening. Well, Connor guesses the tranquilizer should take some credit, but it was mostly the utter fucking disbelief.

By the time Connor finally flops down onto the mats of the wrestling room an hour later, there’s an ache behind his ear from clenching his jaw, which radiates outward to throb at the back of his head and neck. Just when he thought he’d kicked the habit of biting his nails, it shows up in a different way, hopelessly neurotic. It doesn’t seem fair, to be only half present but still this raw at the edges, his head rushing with noise, but only enough to drown his own thoughts. He throws an arm over his eyes and drifts, lets the empty silence lull him into a light sleep.

It’s another hour or so later that Connor wakes up with a sore shoulder from sleeping on the floor, disastrously sober, but thoughts still moving like thick sludge. His mouth tastes like dust, his shoulder aches, and he has to peel himself off the floor, but at least things feel a little quieter. He opens his phone to see the time, finding a string of texts from Evan-- the same one, broken up into three blocks because it won’t fit. 

Just looking at it sitting there makes Connor’s nose wrinkle. It’s long and rambling, an _apology,_ for fuck’s sake. Connor has to set his phone facedown and take a breath to clear his head again. It's ridiculous, he's just accomplished some semblance of peace and even this is threatening to bring everything back to the surface.

Connor is... not mad, he decides, at least not at Evan. Jared is the one to blame, and Connor's the one who made a scene in the first place. If Evan's somehow done anything wrong, it's his apparent lack of self-preservation. He should have just let Connor shove Jared into a locker. That would have solved everything. Instead, all he did was make more people stare. 

The longer Connor knows Evan, the less he feels like he understands about him. Evan is proving to be just as unpredictable as he seems to be set in his ways. He lets Jared push him around, he lets Alana talk his ear off, he lets people literally push and then ignore him in the hallway, and he doesn’t say a word. And then there’s all the things Connor personally has done to harass him-- hell, he’d slammed Evan into a wall the first time they’d ever talked-- but Evan _keeps coming back._ Connor had meant to scare Evan off when he insulted him way back at the beginning of the semester, but he really does wonder what goes through his head sometimes. He can't possibly think so little of himself that he considers _Jared_ worthwhile. If he was smart, he would’ve taken the first hint and stayed far away from Connor too, but here he is defending a jackass like Jared and texting a nutcase like Connor during class. There’s got to be some kind of either self-deprecation or stupidity involved.

 _Pity,_ Connor tells himself, _that’s all it is. Jared’s "misunderstood." You’re a lunatic. He just wants the attention._ Connor hasn’t read much of Evan’s essay, but taps out a message anyway.

_*don’t tell me you’re surprised_

Connor huffs a breath out through his nose. That sounds more hostile than it should. Evan takes a while to respond, but he sends a message before Connor can figure out how to clarify his tone. 

_*I’m sorry. I didn’t think he’d actually say anything.  
*I don’t know why he does things like that_

_*maybe because he's an ass?_

_*He’s usually harmless.  
*The worst he does is tell mean jokes._

_Mean jokes_. Connor scoffs to himself. They're not just mean. They have purpose. They're effective. He's a jackass, and he does it for nobody but himself. Still, what few times he comes up in conversation, considering Connor overtly dislikes Jared, Evan has to make it clear that he doesn’t think Jared is really mean. Sure, he’s a bit of a douche, but he doesn’t mean any harm. _He’s really not that bad._

Connor slides over to a wall and slumps back into it, frowning at the dull ache in his shoulder, coupled with the always-present stinging in his right knuckles. It doesn’t matter if you mean to do harm, he thinks, if you _do_ it. And Jared knows he can hurt people, he just doesn't care. That’s what he wants. He’s the same as the rest of the people that prod at Connor on any given day, just some failed attempt at a computer geek who couldn’t commit to a clique because _no one fucking likes him._

So yeah, Jared didn’t _mean_ to cause any harm, like Connor didn’t _mean_ to topple a bookcase into the living room floor last night, but he did, and Jared did, and Connor has the bruise and the awful day to prove it. 

About fifteen minutes later, Connor finally texts back.

_*you need better friends_

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been like three months since I've touched this and wow I've missed writing it. leave me a comment if you want, I'd love to hear that people are actually here reading this giant mess.  
> thanks for reading!!  
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


	11. Chapter 11

When it comes to lunch, Alana is the one not to show up. It’s just Evan and Jared at their usual table, and it is in fact strange and uncomfortable. Their lunch group has always been tiny and loose-knit. They don’t show up to the same table because they’re friends, just because they all have no better place to go. --Well, actually, Evan does kind of like Alana. She even talks to him outside of class sometimes. But he knows she’s got her Student Government friends, and they take precedence. It’s not a surprise when she ignores Evan and Jared for some activity she’s involved in. If she found someplace more productive to be during lunch than sitting with them, she’d disappear completely for sure. 

Over the past couple weeks, their group has started to dwindle, now that Evan leaves so often to spend lunch in the computer lab-- or recently, to be wherever Connor is. All three of them tend to flake out on lunch at different times, leaving the other two by themselves, or worse, leaving one person alone since they never coordinate it. Evan’s been stuck with Alana a few times, which wasn’t terrible until he realized she is incapable of leaving silences and was neglecting her lunch, too busy making up for Evan’s quietness to really eat. Twice, Evan ended up all alone in the cafeteria, and he’d left jittery and tired due to the lack of a distraction or buffer between him and the crowd.

As it is, Evan and Jared aren’t the most talkative when they’re together. It’s mostly quiet while they spend their time halfheartedly puzzling over Jared’s chemistry homework. Neither of them is much good at it. They pore over the tiny periodic table in Jared’s workbook and draw atomic structures over and over on scratch paper until Jared gives up and starts making patterns out of them while Evan tries to look up help on his phone. 

Before he gets to google, Connor texts him back.

_*you need better friends_

Evan screws his mouth to one side. He can't really disagree, a few people at this table would be nice, but Jared isn't all that bad. He's better than no one.

_*He's not really a friend. We only talk at school._

Evan glances up over his phone to see the worksheet again, having forgotten what he was supposed to be looking up. Jared has drawn a circle through the electrons of one model and is working on turning the nucleus into what looks like a big eye.

“I don’t think that goes there,” Evan says.

“How do _you_ know?” Jared counters. “Valence electrons are a fucking myth.” 

He stops drawing long enough to put the back of the pen between his teeth as he thinks, then with a moment of clarity draws a few lines and circles in specific spots. Evan looks it over, compares it to what he finds on his phone, and then uses his own pen to start drawing a totally new diagram while Jared grumbles. They read it over again, but can't make any more sense of the instructions than before. Jared moves on to the fill in the blank answers while Evan looks up the next diagram.

A couple more of Connor’s texts have come in while they spent time finalizing their answer.

_*god I would murder for some weed  
*who do I have to murder to be high right this second_

_*Don’t murder anyone. That won’t work._

_*wonder how far I could get if I just started walking after school_  
_*parents wouldn’t know where to find me i’d just be on some random street_  
_*think I could make it to the mall?_

_*You probably shouldn’t do that…_  
_*Your mom would worry about you._

_*that’s half the point_

Evan frowns to himself, not sure how to respond. Luckily, Connor's texts are instant.

_*i’m gonna be stuck here with Zoe anyway that’s a good head start_

_*Oh yeah, doesn’t she have a concert coming up?_

_*right I forgot you were stalking my sister_

_*I’m not! I just know they have a concert soon_  
_*wait you told me she had a concert_  
_*I just know they have practice today._

_*wow  
*creep_

Jared shoots Evan a strange glance when he scoffs at his phone, but doesn’t comment. Evan tilts himself so his phone is further out of Jared’s view. 

_*yeah she’s supposed to be babysitting me but she doesn’t care anymore  
*guess I’m gonna walk until I get lost_

_*Don’t do that._

_*you don’t look like my dad_

“Who the fuck are you texting?” Jared cuts in, leaning to the side to get a look at Evan’s screen. He’s finished the fill in the blank section and has been watching Evan text instead.

“What?” Evan locks his phone on reflex. “Oh, uh… m-my mom?”

Jared rolls his eyes. “Dude, don’t tell people that,” he chastises, then turns his pen over to tap the back against the top of Evan’s phone. “Aluminum hexa...whatever?”

“Right…” Evan says, narrowing his eyes, but still getting back on task.

Jared doodles another half-assed guess while Evan looks up the second problem, ignoring a few more message alerts for the time being. Connor is a shockingly fast texter, it turns out-- especially compared to Evan, who has been known to agonize over the placement of a comma. It had taken a few days of awkward three-word conversations to get started, but then Connor was sending him whole novels of text during study hall while he smoked, and Evan couldn’t find it in himself to be annoyed. Connor is funny, sometimes without trying, and he texts Evan even when he has nothing real to say. 

Again, Jared tries to look over Evan’s shoulder, so he finally surrenders the phone and places it face up on the table between them. 

“Don’t you ever, like, do your homework at home?” Evan asks, nudging his phone over towards Jared’s side of the table so that he backs out of Evan’s space.

“Of course not. Who do you think I am?” 

Evan’s phone vibrates with another message, which Jared swipes away on reflex, not leaving enough time to see any of it. 

“ _AP Calc…_ ” Evan mutters, leaning his cheek on his hand now that he’s got nothing to do.

“Calc is different,” Jared is quick to clarify. “That’s the only one I do. Everything else is easy.” He hurries through copying a problem, then flips the worksheet over and begins typing in the next one.

“What about English?” Evan counters.

Jared doesn’t answer, absently mouthing a sentence to himself as he speed-reads through the webpage. There’s only a few minutes left in the lunch period. Evan lets him go and watches the clock above the door tick the last three minutes away while Jared scribbles down answers.

“Tell your boy-toy to calm down, Jesus,” Jared says. The message icon is blinking with yet another notification. “How do I screenshot this?”

The bell rings before Evan has a chance to react. They don’t bother trying to talk over the shuffling of all the people around them, which is fine because Evan’s not sure what to do with that. Jared texts the webpage to himself and leaves without saying anything else.

  


• • •

  


Connor taps his toe against the pavement behind him, waiting for a car to cross the intersection, when he realizes the creek running underneath the street is the same one that goes by his house. He'd been hoping to get lost, but as it stands, he's ended up most of the way home. The wooded streets he'd chosen to walk have taken him in a long arc and spat him out just on the other side of the elementary school. He's been walking for about twenty minutes, which is a little longer than it should take to get here, but he's made a few deliberately unfamiliar turns.

The car rolls off up the road and Connor crosses after it, slowing down now that he knows where he is. He blows out a breath and watches it turn into vapor in the air, and then slows to a stop and a lazy half turn in the middle of the empty street while he decides which direction he wants to go.

The sun continues its descent past the tops of the trees on the hill ahead of him, pushed lower by the waning of the season. It casts orange through the motion of the remaining leaves, and makes Connor's shadow stretch out in contrast across the asphalt behind him. A soft little breeze blows his way, rustling his hair and making him duck his head down into the collar of his hoodie. By now, Connor's ears are partially numb from cold, and a little pink where they poke out from his hair. He also hadn't brought a proper jacket to be walking around in, so his arms get bit by cold whenever there's wind. It's not terrible, but not really pleasant either. If he kept walking, he could probably get far enough to lose himself again, but he'd really be freezing by then. It had all seemed like a good idea until he was out here and starting to shiver. 

His house is just up the hill, past the little cropping of woods and the school, where the houses are farther apart and you can see down the hill towards town. The hill isn't very steep, it's not all that far, but he's suddenly so tired and so unwilling that he crosses that direction right off the list. He's used to dreading coming home at the end of the day, knowing that there’s an argument always waiting for him. Arriving home now would feel like a loss, after walking so far to be anywhere else but there. 

Connor turns his back towards the hill and the sun, and faces his shadow, watching the edges fade in and out of focus as the wind moves the trees. He's been spacing out for a few seconds too long, letting things fade out of focus again, a running theme for today. He tugs his hood up over his head to shield his ears for a while and considers his options.

He can't go right since that's the way he came from. It's either left, or straight down the hill. Straight is back towards his school, sort of. If he'd walked directly home, that's where he would have ended up, so it's almost like backtracking too. 

Connor's not sure where the left might take him, but he knows that if he goes straight, a few blocks down and at the end of a cul-de-sac, there is a stout blue house full of college kids, smoke, and dog fur, where he can find a way to get high. He could go there and then smoke in the park until Zoe finds him. Or, he could go there and not to the park, and Zoe could _not_ find him. It sounds like the clear best option, except that... well, he hasn't been back there since summer, and not entirely by choice. Still, the fact is he's run out of weed, he has nothing to use but the shitty prescription, and he supposes he'd be back there sometime soon anyway.

Connor fiddles with the slider on the strap of his bag, making the strap shorter and then longer again as he looks down the hill, zoning out and unable to focus. A car drifts up to the stop sign a block over, but turns right, flashing Connor with its headlights for a brief second. He steps out of the crosswalk into the middle of the intersection and listens to the sound of the car drifting off into the quiet until it's just him again. 

Who is he kidding? There was never really a choice here. He knew where he would end up before he started walking. He always ends up back where he started, because he never really changes course. He is stuck on a rail that loops between meltdowns at school and screaming matches at home, and the only thing that seems to slow it down is to get too high to notice the motion. 

The fight that's waiting for him at home right now is one he's been through too many times to count. It's another intervention. The school has talked to his parents again, or whatever, and they want to send him to another program, or they want to talk about a different system, try out whatever Cynthia’s flavor of the month happens to be. And based on this morning? He doesn't even want to think about what’s in store this time. He's too tired. His bag's too heavy. There's no way he's climbing that hill just to get home.

He wishes he could turn around and actually stay lost, walk far enough that he could walk right out of his skin. He keeps trying, getting higher and walking farther, but no matter how far he walks, he’s still the same. There's no real getting lost when the thing he's trying to get a break from is himself. Really, he shouldn’t be surprised anymore. The pattern is simple. If he manages to be alone for a while, he's going to end up high. It's just the way he works. The cycle keeps rolling. He gets high. His parents drag him home. He breaks his knuckles open. He gets suspended. He’s on his last strike.

Another small gust of wind blows past, almost taking Connor's hood down and making him shrink into his jacket. He takes out his phone to see how long he has before Zoe will start pestering him. It’s only 3:25. He could walk left and freeze for thirty-five more minutes, or he could go straight, get high, and give his parents a real reason to yell at him later. Maybe they could skip the whole intervention charade and go straight to the screaming match. Maybe he could even get high enough to crash tonight.

There’s a couple of old messages on his phone when he looks. It looks like Evan is still somehow trying to convince him not to go someplace he shouldn’t. Connor had mentioned climbing an electrical tower as a joke, when school let out, but Evan might have taken that a bit too literally. Connor can’t blame him, actually. He wouldn’t put it past himself. 

Evan’s always been twitchy, but it feels strange to have him worrying on Connor’s behalf for a change. He just doesn't know how to stop, Connor guesses. 

_*You're not actually lost are you?  
*It's supposed to freeze out there. Did you go to the mall?_

_*I'm lost._  
_*can’t get a signal_

Connor starts walking left. Fuck the cold, and fuck the blue house. He gets all the way to the three-way stop at the end of the street before he realizes he recognizes this too. The roads this way turn into dead ends where the woods get thicker, and a few small ones keep on going to wind a bit farther back into the brush. The cul-de-sacs give way to big yards with gravel driveways and non-uniform, flat houses in the middle. 

_*don’t you live by the elem school?_

_*Sort of. Why?_

  


• • •

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! you're the best!! <3  
> harass me on [tumblr](http://bonelessgoo.tumblr.com)


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